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£*; 














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THE KING OF FOLLY ISLAND, and Other 
People. i6mo, $1.25. 

A WHITE HERON, and Other Stories. i8mo, 
gilt top, $1.25. 

A MARSH ISLAND. A Novel. i6nio, ^>1.25. 

A COUNTRY DOCTOR. A Novel. i6mo, $1.25. 

THE MATE OF THE DAYLIGHT, and Friends 
Ashore. i8mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

COUNTRY BY-WAYS. i8mo, gilt top, ^ 1.25. 

DEEPHAVEN. i8mo, gilt top, $i.2c,. 

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51 . 25 - 

tales OF NEW ENGLAND. In Riverside Aldine 
Series. i6mo, Ji.ooj Limited First Edition, 51.50. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York. 





cou 



SARAH ORNE JEWETT 

1 / 


EIGHTH EDITION 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
(€(« CambriDge 

1892 











" 0 ' 


Cop3mght, 1881, 

By SARAH ORNE JEWETT. 


All rights reserved. 


The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A* 

* Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 


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To 


T. H. J., 

MY DEAR FATHER ; MY DEAR FRIEND ; 

THE BEST AND WISEST MAN I EVER KNEW; 

WHO TAUGHT ME MANY LESSONS AND SHOWED ME MANY THINGS 

AS WE WENT TOGETHER ALONG THE 

COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 



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CONTENTS. 


PA«1 

Riter Driftwood .••••». I 

Andrew^s Fortune. 34 

An October Ride 92 

From a Mournful Villager • • . • 116 

An Autumn Holiday.. , 139 

A Winter Drive ..••••• 163 

Good Luck : a Girl^s Story. 186 

Miss Becky’s Filorimaob • • • • • S 18 










RIYER DRIFTWOOD. 



T the head of tide-water on the river there 
is a dam, and above it is a large mill-pond, 
where most of the people who row and sail 
keep their boats all summer long. I like, perhaps 
once a year, to cruise around the shores of this pretty 
sheet of water; but I am always conscious of the 
dam above it and the dam below it, and of being con¬ 
fined between certain limits. I rarely go beyond a 
certain point on the lower or tide river, as people call 
it, but I always have the feeling that I can go to Eu¬ 
rope, if I like, or anywhere on the high seas ; and 
when I unfasten the boat there is no dam or harbor 
bar, or any barrier whatever between this and all for¬ 
eign ports. Far up among the hills the ocean comes, 
and its tide ebbs and flows. 

When the tide goes out, the narrow reaches of the 
river become rapids, where a rushing stream fights 











2 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


with the ledges and loose rocks, and where one needs 
a good deal of skill to guide a boat down safely. 
Where the river is wide, at low tide one can only 
see the mud flats and broad stretches of green marsh 
grass. But w'hen the tide is in it is a noble and dig¬ 
nified stream. There are no rapids and only a slow 
current, where the river from among the inland 
mountains flows along, finding its way to the sea, 
wliich has come part way to welcome the company of 
springs and brooks that have answered to its call. A 
thousand men band themselves together, and they are 
one regiment; a thousand little streams flow together, 
and are one river; but one fancies that they do not 
lose themselves altogether; while the individuality of 
a river must come mainly from the different charac¬ 
ters of its tributaries. The shape of its shores and 
the quality of the soil it passes over determine cer¬ 
tain things about it, but the life of it is something by 
itself, as the life of a man is separate from the cir¬ 
cumstances in which he is placed. There must be 
the first spring which overflows steadily and makes a 
brook, which some second spring joins, and the third, 
and the fourth; and at last there is a great stream, in 
which the later brooks seem to make little difference 
I should like to find the very beginning and head¬ 
water of my river. I should be sorry if it were a 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


3 


pond, thoTigh somewhere in the ground underneath 
there would be a spring that kept the secret and was 
in command and under marching orders to the sea, 
commissioned to recruit as it went along. Here at 
the head of tide-water it first meets the sea, and then 
when the tide is in there is the presence of royalty, 
or at least its deputies. The river is a grand thing 
when it is river and sea together; but how one 
misses the ocean when the tide is out, for in the 
great place it filled the stream from the hills, after 
all, looks of little consequence. 

The river is no longer the public highway it used 
to be years ago, when the few roads were rough, and 
railroads were not even dreamed of. The earliest 
chapter of its history that I know is that it was full 
of salmon and other fish, and was a famous fishing- 
ground with the Indians, who were masters of its 
neighboring country. To tell its whole story one 
would have to follow the fashion of the old Spanish 
writers whom Garcilasso de la Vega says he will not 
imitate, in the first chapter of his Commentaries of 
the Yncas, — that delightful composition of uncon¬ 
scious pathos and majestic lies. When his predeces¬ 
sors in the field of literature wished to write on any 
subject whatever, lie solemnly tells us, they always 
began with a history of the globe. One cannot help 


4 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


wishing that he had not disdained to follow their ei 
ample, and had given his theories, which would have 
been wildly ahead of even the fancies of his time, in 
general, and full of most amusing little departures 
from the truth when he came down to details. But 
the earliest history of the river can well be ignored ; 
it is but seldom, as yet, that people really care much 
for anything for its own sake, until it is proved to 
have some connection with human-kind. We are 
slow to take an interest in the personality of our 
neighbors who are not men, or dogs, or horses, or at 
least some creature who can be made to understand a 
little of our own spoken language. Who is going to 
be the linguist who learns the first word of an old 
crow’s warning to his mate, or how a little dog ex¬ 
presses himself when he asks a big one to come and 
rout his troublesome enemy ? How much we shall 
know when the pimpernel teaches us how she makes 
her prophecies of the weather, and how long we shall 
have to go to school when people are expected to 
talk to the trees, and birds, and beasts, in their own 
language! What tune could it have been that Or¬ 
pheus and Amphion played, to which the beasts list¬ 
ened, and even the trees and stones followed them 
to hear ? Is it science that will give us back the 
gift, or shall we owe it to the successors of those 


4 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


5 


friendly old saints who talked with the birds and 
fishes ? We could have schools for them, if we once 
could understand them, and could educate them into 
being more useful to us. There would be intelligent 
sword-fish for submarine divers, and we could send 
swallows to carry messages, and all the creatures that 
know how to burrow in the earth would bring us the 
treasures out of it. I should have a larger calling ac¬ 
quaintance than ever out-of-doors, and my neighbors 
down river would present me to congenial friends 
whom as yet I have not discovered. The gods are 
always drawing like toward like, and making them 
acquainted, if Homer may be believed, but we are 
apt to forget that this is true of any creatures but 
ourselves. It is not necessary to tame them before 
they can be familiar and responsive; we can meet 
them on their own ground, and be surprised to find 
how much we may have in common. Taming is only 
forcing them to learn some of our customs; we 
should be wise if we let them tame'us to make use of 
some of theirs. They share other instincts and emo¬ 
tions with us beside surprise, or suspicion, or fear. 
They are curiously thoughtful; they act no more 
from unconscious instinct than we do ; at least, they 
are called upon to decide as many questions of action 
«r direction, and there are many emergencies of life 


6 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


when we are far more helpless and foolish than they. 
It is easy to say that other orders of living creatures 
exist on a much lower plane than ourselves ; we 
know very little about it, after all. They are often 
gifted in some way that we are not; they may even 
carry some virtue of ours to a greater height than we 
do. But the day will come for a more truly univer¬ 
sal suffrage than we dream of now, when the mean¬ 
ing of every living thing is understood, and it is given 
its rights and accorded its true value: for its life is 
from God’s life, and its limits were fixed by him; its 
material shape is the manifestation of a thought, and 
to each body there is given a spirit. 

The great gulls watch me float along the river, cu¬ 
riously, and sail in the air overhead. Who knows 
what they say of me when they talk together; and 
what are they thinking about when they fly quickly 
out of sight ? Perhaps they know something about 
me that I do not know of myself yet; and so may the 
musk-rat, as he hurries through the water with a lit¬ 
tle green branch in his mouth which will make a 
salad for his supper. He watches me with his sharp 
eyes, and whisks into his hole in the sunny side of 
the island. I have a respect for him; he is a busy 
creature, and he lives well. You might be hospitabU 
»nd ask me to supper, musk-rat! I don’t know 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


7 


ivhether I should care much for you if I were an¬ 
other musk-rat, or you were a human being, but I 
shall know you again when I see you by an odd mark 
in the fur on the top of your head, and that is some¬ 
thing. I suppose the captive mussels in your den 
are quaking now at hearing you come in. I have 
lost sight of you, but I shall remember where your 
house is. I do not think people are thankful enough 
who live out of the reach of beasts that would eat 
them. When one thinks of whole races of small 
creatures like the mussels which are the natural and 
proper food of others, it seems an awful fact and ne¬ 
cessity of nature ; perhaps, however, no more awful 
than our natural death appears to us. But there is 
something distressing about being eaten, and having 
one’s substance minister to a superior existence! It 
tiurts one’s pride. A death that preserves and ele¬ 
vates our identity is much more consoling and satis¬ 
factory ; but what can reconcile a bird to its future 
as part of tlie tissues of a cat, going stealthily afoot, 
and by nature treacherous ? Who can say, however, 
that our death may not be simply a link in the chain? 
One thing is made the prey of another. In some way 
uur present state ministers to the higher condition to 
which we are coming. The grass is made somehow 
from the ground, and presently that is turned into 


6 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


beef, and that goes to make part of a human being. 
We are not certain what an angel may be; but the 
life in us now will be necessary to the making of one 
by and by. 

There is a wise arrangement in this merging and 
combining. It makes more room in the world. We 
must eat our fellows and be eaten to keep things 
within a proper limit. If all the orders of life were 
self-existing, and if all the springs that make up the 
river flowed down to the sea separately and inde¬ 
pendently, there would be an awful confusion and 
chaos still; but this leads one to think of the trans¬ 
migration of souls and other puzzling subjects 1 I 
shall have to end with an ignorant discourse about 
the globe instead of having begun with it. My river, 
as I said at first, leads to the sea, and from any port 
one can push off toward another sea of boundless 
speculation and curious wonderings about this world, 
familiar, and yet so great a mystery. 

There are a thousand things to remember and to 
say about the river, which seems to be of little use in 
the half dozen miles I know best, after it has made 
itself of great consequence by serving to carry per¬ 
haps a dozen or twenty mills, of one kind and an¬ 
other. Between its dams it has a civilized and sub¬ 
jected look, but below the last falls, at the Landing, i 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


9 


apparently feels itself to be its own master, and serves 
ill no public capacity except to carry a boat now and 
then, and give the chance for building some weirs, as 
it offers some good fishing when the alewives and 
bass come up, with bony and muddy shad, that are 
about as good to eat as a rain-soaked paper of pins. 
I think its chief use is its beauty, and that has never 
been as widely appreciated as it ought to be. It is 
the eastern branch of the Piscataqua, which separates 
the States of Maine and New Hampshire; and I, be¬ 
ing a lawless borderer, beg you to follow for a raid 
on the shores, not for pillaging the farms and cattle¬ 
lifting, but to see the trees and their shadows in the 
water: the high, steep banks where the great pines 
of Maine thrive, on one hand, and the gently sloping 
Southern New Plampshire fields fringed with willows 
and oaks on the other. When you catch sight of a 
tall lateen sail and a strange, clumsy craft that looks 
heavy and low in the water, you will like to know 
that its ancestor was copied from a Nile boat, from 
which a sensible old sea-captain took a lesson in 
ship-building many years ago. The sail is capjtally 
fitted to catch the uncertain wind, which is apt to 
come in flaws and gusts between the high, irregular 
banks of the river; and the boat is called a gunda- 
low, but sometimes spelled gondola. One sees them 


10 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


often on the Merrimac and on the Piscataqua and its 
branches, and the sight of them brings a curiously 
foreign element into the New England scenery; for I 
never see the great peaked sail coming round a point 
without a quick association with the East, with the 
Mediterranean ports or the Nile itself, with its ruins 
and its desert and the bright blue sky overhead ; with 
mummies and scarabei and the shepherd kings; with 
the pyramids and Sphinx — that strange group, so 
old one shudders at the thought of it — standing clear 
against the horizon. 

A hundred years ago the northern country was 
covered for the most part with heavy timber, and 
the chief business at Berwick was receiving this from 
the lumbermen, and sending it to Portsmouth to be 
reshipped, or direct to the West Indies, to be bar 
tered for rum and tobacco and molasses, which miMit 
be either brought home at once, or sent to Russia, to 
be exchanged again for iron and sail-cloth and cord¬ 
age. Not forty years ago there were still twenty 
gundalows sailing from the Landing wharves, while 
now there are but two, and long after that the packet 
boat went regularly every other day to Portsmouth. 
Until the days of the railroads most of the freight 
came by water, and the packet skippers were impor¬ 
tant men. I have always wished to know something 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


11 


more of the history of the quaint little packet store¬ 
house which, until within a year or two, stood in the 
mill-yard, just below the falls. It was built of heavy 
timbers, as if it might some day be called upon to re¬ 
sist a battering-ram. The stories were very low, and 
the upper one projected over the water with a beam, 
to which was fastened a tackle and fall to hoist and 
lower the goods. It was a little building, but there 
was a great air of consequence about it. It was 
painted a dark red, which the weather had dulled a 
good deal, and it leaned to one side. Nobody knew 
how old it was ; it was like a little old woman who be¬ 
longed to a good family, now dead, save herself; and 
who could remember a great many valuable people 
and events which everybody else had forgotten. It 
was the last of the warehouses that used to stand on 
the river-banks, and I was sorry when it was pulled 
down. The old wharves have almost disappeared, 
too, though their timbers can still be seen here and 
there. 

It sometimes takes me a whole afternoon to go 
two miles down the river. There are many reasons 
why I should stop every now and then under one 
bank or another; to look up through the trees at the 
sky, or at their pictures in the water; or to let the 
boat lie still, until one can watch the httle fish come 


12 


COUNTRY BY-WATS. 


back to their playground on the yellow sand and 
gravel; or to see the frogs, that splashed into the 
water at my approach, poke their heads out a little 
way to croak indignantly, or raise a loud note such 
as Scotch bagpipers drive out of the pipes before they 
start a tune. The swallows dart like bats along the 
surface of the water after insects, and I see a drowned 
white butterfly float by, and reach out for it; it looks 
80 frail and little in the river. When the cardinal 
flowers are in bloom I go' from place to place until I 
have gathered a deckload; and as I push off the boat 
it leaves the grass bent down, and the water-mint 
that was crushed sends a delicious fragrance after 
me, and I catch at a piece and put a leaf in my mouth, 
and row away lazily to get a branch of oak or maple 
leaves to keep the sun off my flowers. Cardinals are 
quick to wilt, and hang their proud heads wearily. 
They keep royal state in the shade, and one imagines 
that the other flowers and all the weeds at the water’s 
edge take care to bow to them as often as the wind 
comes by, and pay them honor. They are like fine 
court ladies in their best gowns, standing on the 
shore. Perhaps they are sending messages down tJie 
river and across the seas, or waiting to hear some 
news. They make one think of Whittier’s high, 
born Amy Wentworth and her sailor lover, for they 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


13 


Beem like flowers from a palace garden that are away 
from home masquerading and waiving ceremony, and 
taking the country air. They wear a color that is the 
sign of high ecclesiastical rank, and the temper of 
their minds would make them furies if they fought 
for church and state. They are no radicals ; they 
are tories and aristocrats ; they belong to the old 
nobility among flowers. It would be a pity if the 
rank marsh grass overran them, or if the pickerel 
weed should wade ashore to invade them and humble 
their pride. They are flowers that after all one 
should not try to put into vases together. They 
have, like many other flowers, too marked an indi¬ 
viduality, and there is more pleasure to be taken 
from one tall and slender spire of blossoms by itself, 
just as it is pleasanter to be alone with a person one 
admires and enjoys. To crowd some flowers together 
you lose all delight in their shape and beauty ; you 
only have the pleasure of the mass of color or of 
their perfume; and there are enough bl ight flowers 
and fragrant flowers that are only beautiful in masses. 
To look at some flowers huddlgd together and losing 
all their grace and charm is like trying to find com¬ 
panionship and sympathy by looking for a minute at 
ft crowd of people. But there is a low trait of ac¬ 
quisitiveness in human nature. I pick cardinal flow 


14 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


ers by the armful, and nothing less than a blue-and- 
white ginger pot full of daisies is much satisfaction. 

But to most people one tree, or flower, or river is 
as good as another, and trees and flowers and rivers 
are to be found without trouble, while there are some 
who would never know who has lived beside my 
river unless it were told here. That says at once 
that their fame at best is provincial, exce{)t for pep¬ 
pery little Captain John Paul Jones, who gathered 
the ship’s company of the Ranger from these neigh¬ 
boring farms. Old people, who died not many years 
ago, remembered him as he walked on the wharves 
at Portsmouth, with his sword point scratching the 
ground ; a little wasp of a fellow, with a temper like 
a blaze of the gunpowder whose smoke he loved. 
One can imagine him scrambling up the shore here 
to one of the old farm-houses, as short as a boy; but 
as tall as a grenadier, in his pride and dignity ; and 
marching into the best room, in all the vainglory and 
persuasiveness of his uniform, to make sure of a good 
fellow whose looks he liked, and whom he promised 
to send home a gallant hero, with his sea-chest full 
of prize-money. And afterward he would land again 
at one of the stately old colonial mansions that used 
to stand beside the river, at the Wallingford house 
by Madam’s Cove, or at the Hamilton house, and be 
received with befitting ceremony. 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


15 


There were many fine houses in this region in old 
times, but only one still lingers, — this same Hamil¬ 
ton house, — which seems to me unrivaled for the 
beauty of its situation, and for a certain grand air 
which I have found it hard to match in any house 
1 have ever seen. It is square and gray, with four 
great chimneys, and many dormer windows in its 
high-peaked roof; it stands on a point below which 
the river is at its widest. The rows of poplars and 
its terraced garden have fallen and been spoiled by 
time, but a company of great elms stand guard over 
it, and the sunset reddens its windows, and the days 
of the past seem to have come back, when one is near 
it, its whole aspect is so remote from the spirit of 
the present. Inside there are great halls and square 
rooms with carved wood-work, arched windows and 
mahogany window-seats, and fire-places that are wide 
enough almost for a seat in the chimney-corner. In 
the country about I have heard many a tradition of 
the way this house was kept; of the fine ladies and 
gentlemen, and tlie great dinner-parties, and the 
guests who used to come up the river from Ports¬ 
mouth, and go home late in the moonlight evening 
at the turn of the tide. In those days the wharves 
that are fast being washed away were strong enough, 
%nd there were warehouses and storehouses and piles 


16 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


of timber all along the river. The builder of the 
house was a successful man, who made a great fort¬ 
une in the lucky West India trade of his time ; he 
was poor to begin with, but everything prospered 
steadily with his business interests, and one owes 
him a debt of gratitude for leaving so fine a house to 
delight our eyes. 

A little way up the shore there was formerly a 
ship-yard, and I know of four ships that were built 
there much less than fifty years ago. My grandfather 
was part owner of them, and their names, with those 
of other ships, have been familiar to me from my 
babyhood. It is amusing that the ships of a family 
concerned in navigation seem to belong to it and to 
be part of it, as if they were children who had grown 
up and gone wandering about the world. Long after 
some familiar craft has changed owners even, its fort¬ 
unes are affectionately watched, and to know that a 
ship has been spoken at sea gives a good deal of 
pleasure beside the assurance that the cargo is so 
%r on its way to market at Canton or Bombay. I 
smember wondering why the smooth green bank, 
where the dandelions were so thick in spring, should 
be called the ship-yard by my family, and even why 
Rny one should call that corner of the town the 
Lower Landing, since nothing ever seemed to land, 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


17 


anlcss it were the fleets that children built from chips 
and shingles. It is a lovely, quiet place, and I often 
think of an early summer morning when T was go¬ 
ing down river in a row-boat. The dandelions were 
sprinkled all over the short green grass, and high on 
the shore, under a great elm, were two wandering 
young musicians. They had evidently taken the 
wrong road, and discovered that this was a long lane 
that led only to the great house on the point and to 
the water’s edge. They must have been entertained, 
for they seemed very cheerful; one played a violin, 
and the other danced. It was like a glimpse of sun¬ 
shiny, idle Italy: the sparkling river and the blue 
sky, the wide green shores and the trees, and the 
great gray house, witli its two hall doors standing 
wide open, the lilacs in bloom, and no noise or 
hurry, — a quiet place, that the destroying left hand 
of progress had failed to touch. 

One day I was in one of the upper rooms of the 
Hamilton house in a dormer window, and I was 
amused at reading the nonsense some young girl had 
written on the wall. The view was beautiful, and I 
thought she must have sat there with her work, or 
have watched the road or the river for some one 
whom she wished to see coming. There were senti¬ 
mental verses, written at different times. She seemed 
2 


18 


COUNTRY BY- WAYS. 


to )jave made a sort of scrap-book of the bit of wall, 
and she had left me the date, which was very kind 
of her ; so I knew that it was 1802, and in the sum* 
mer, that she used to sit there in her favorite perch. 
This is one of her verses that I remember t — 

“May you be blest with all that Hea\’en may send, 

Long life, good health, much pleasure in a triend; 

May 3mu in every clime most happy be, 

And when far distant often think of me.” 

It was very pleasant to catch this glimpse of girl 
hood in the old house. I wondered how she liked life 
as she grew older, and if the lover — if that were a 
lover — did think often enough of her, and come back 
to her at last from the distant climes. She could have 
wished him nothing better than much pleasure in a 
friend. I do not know the history of many members 
of the family; Colonel Hamilton and his consort are 
buried under a heavy monument in the Old Fields 
burying-ground, and at the end of the long epitaph is 
the solemn announcement that Hamilton is no more. 
It would be a strange sight if one of his heavily-laden 
little sliips came up the river now; but I like to think 
about those days, and how there might have happened 
to be some lumbermen from far inland, who were de¬ 
lighted to gossip with the sailors and carry back up 
mio the country the stories of their voyage. When 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 19 

the French prisoners of war came into Portsmouth, 1 
have heard old people say that there was a great ex¬ 
citement, and as the ships came in they looked like 
gardens, for the Frenchmen had lettuces for salads, 
and flowers growing in boxes that were fastened on 
the decks; and it was amusing to hear of these pris¬ 
oners being let out on parole about the country towns, 
in Eliot and Newington and Kittery, and all up and 
down the river. Perhaps more than one of them 
found their way to the hospitable families in Berwick 
and were entertained as became their rank and fort¬ 
unes. In an old house in Eliot there is a little draw¬ 
ing made by one of these men, and I have an exquis¬ 
ite little water-color painting of a carnation, with the 
quaintly written request that charming Sally will 
sometimes thiidv of the poor Ribere, who will never 
forget her. It is all that is left of what must have 
been a tender friendship between this gallant young 
Frenchman and my grandmother. I found it once 
among her copy-books, and letters from her girt 
friends, and love-letters from my grandfather which 
lie sent home to her from sea. She was very young 
when the poor Ribere was so sorry to part from her, 
tor she married at eighteen (and died at twenty-five) 

I knew very little about her until I found in the gar¬ 
ret the little brass-nailed trunk that had kept her se- 


20 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


crets for me. I am sure she often made one of the 
company that used to come up the river to take tea 
and go home by moonlight. She was a beautiful girl, 
and everybody was fond of her. The poor Ribere 
sat beside her in the boat, I have no doubt; and per¬ 
haps it was in the terraced garden with the rows of 
poplars round it, that she picked the flower he painted, 
and no doubt he carried it away with him when he 
was set free again, and was not a prisoner of war any 
longer. 

There was formerly a bright array of clerical talenr 
in the river towns, and it was most amusing to listen 
to the anecdotes which the old people of the last 
generation delighted to tell of the ministers. Not to 
speak of the well-known Portsmouth divines, and of 
Dr. Stevens, of Kittery Point, there was the Rever¬ 
end Mr. Litchfield, of Kittery, who was called the 
fisher parson, and his neighbor. Parson Chandler, wh’o 
might have been called the farmer parson, for he was 
a celebrated tiller of the soil, and his example was a 
great blessing to the members of his Eliot parisli. 
The fields there slope to the south and west, and the 
grass grows green sooner than anywhere else in the 
region, and the fruits of the earth grow and ripen 
quickly. He taught his neighbors to improve uj)on 
►he old fashions of agriculture. An old friend oi 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


21 


mine told me that once he was driving from Ports¬ 
mouth to Berwick, in his early manhood, with Daniel 
Webster for company, and when they passed this 
clergyman’s house Mr. Webster said that he should 
be perfectly satisfied if he could be as great a man as 
Parso«» Chandler ; and judging from the stories of 
his wisdom and eloquence, the young lawyer’s was 
(10 mean ambition. Mr. Litchfield spent much of 
his time o*.i week days in the apostolic business of 
catching fish ; and he was a man of rare wit and 
drollery, with a sailor-like serenity and confidence 
in everything’s coming out right at last, and a true 
mariner’s readiness and intentness when there was 
work to be done. Once, at a conference in Ports¬ 
mouth, the preacher failed to come, and some one had 
to furnish a sermon in his place. It fell to Mr. Litch¬ 
field’s share ; and old Dr. Buckminster said, when the 
discourse was ended, — it being extemporaneous and 
very eloquent, — “ My friends,-the fisher parson beats 
us all!” It is interesting to find that many of the 
clergymen of that day seem to have been uncommonly 
practical men. One fancies that they all preached 
the better because much of their time was spent in a 
way that brought them in close contact with people’s 
tvery-day lives. It was no ideal human nature, stud¬ 
ied from sermons and theological works, and classi 


22 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


fied and doomed at the recommendation of the old di 
vines. One can believe that it was not abstract gen 
eralities of a state of sinfulness so much as particu¬ 
lar weakness and shortcomings that they condemned 
from their pulpits. Parson Litchfield could preach 
gallantly at some offender who stole from and lied 
about his lobster-pots when he took his text from 
Ananias and Sapphira, and Parson Chandler could 
be most impressive and ready with illustration when 
he chose the parable of the sower for the subject of 
his discourse. In Berwick there was a grave and 
solemn little man, whom all his great parish long re¬ 
membered admiringly. The church where the wdiole 
town centred was at the Old Fields, and it ought to 
be standing yet, but I do not know that anything is 
left of it but a bit of paper I found one day, on 
which is written the names of the mey who built it 
and the sums of money and bundles of shingles or 
pieces of timber that each contributed. 

I do not know why this should have been so super- 
utitious a neighborhood, but there seems to have been 
a great deal of trouble from ghosts, and it was the 
duty of the ministers to drive them away, or to “ lay ” 
them, as they called it then. An old man told me 
once that the parsons made a great secret of it. They 
met together in a room, which nobody was allowed to 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


23 


enter; so whether it was a service witli mysterious 
rites, or they only joked together, and thought it 
well to keep up the reverence in the rustic mind for 
the power of the priesthood, nobody knows to this 
day. There is still standing at the Landing a house 
that has always been said to be haunted. Its ghost 
was laid properly, but she seems to have risen again 
defiantly. It formerly stood very near the shore of 
tlie little harbor, if one may give that name to what 
was simply the head of navigation on the river. The 
family who built and owned it first all died long ago, 
but I never go by the house without thinking of 
its early histoi-y in those days, when the court end of 
the little town was next the river, and the old elms 
shaded the men who were busy with their trading 
and shipping, and the women who kept up a stately 
fashion of living in-doors, and walked proudly to and 
fro in the streets dressed in strange stuffs that had 
been brought home to them from across the seas. 
There was a fine set of people in the little town, and 
I^erwick held its head very high, and thought some of 
the neighboring towns of little consequence that have 
long since outgrown it and looked down upon it in 
their turn. It even has given up its place as the 
head of the family of villages into which the original 
township has been divided. It is only South I>er« 


24 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


wick now ; but I like to call it Berwick here, as it has 
a right to be called, for it was the oldest settlement, 
and the points of the compass should have been given 
to the newer centres of civilization which were its off¬ 
shoots. 

The oldest houses are, with one or two excep¬ 
tions, by far the finest ones, and the one of wdiich I 
have spoken still keeps up as well as it can the pride 
as well as the name of its first owner. One cannot 
help being interested in this man, who was one of the 
earlier physicians of the town, and also had a hand 
in the business that was connected with the river. I 
have heard that he came from Plymouth in Massa¬ 
chusetts and was a minister’s son, but if ever a man’s 
heart gloried in the good things of this life it was his, 
and there w-as not a trace of Puritan asceticism in his 
character. His first house was the finest in town, 
and stood at the head of some terraces that still re¬ 
main, bordered with rows of elms, and overlooked 
the river ; but that was burnt, and afterward replaced 
by another, which was for some mysterious reason 
built at the foot of the terraces near the water. The 
doctor was said to be a very handsome man, and he 
dressed uncommonly well, delighting himself with fine 
broadcloth cloaks with red linings and silk facings 
md his visits to his admiring patients were paid on 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


25 


horseback, as was the custom then, but he always 
rode an excellent horse, and dashed about the coun¬ 
try in great splendor. He made an elaborate will, 
entailing his property in English fashion. He waited 
to see how much General Lord or the other rich men 
of the town would pay toward any subscription, and 
then exceeded the most generous. He even asked 
how much the richest man in the town was taxed, 
and paid of his own accord a larger sum than he, 
and somehow contrived to keep up year after year 
this appearance of great wealth, and expected and 
received great deference; though those who knew 
him best w'ere sure he must -be poor, the pride that 
went with it forbade familiarity and sympathy alike. 
There has always been a tradition that his first wife 
came to her death by foul means, and there is a dis¬ 
like to the house, which seems never to be occupied 
for any length of time,"even after all these years. The 
people in the neighborhood believe, as I have said, 
that it is haunted, and I have often heard stories of 
the strange cries, and the footsteps that sometimes 
follow you if you go up the hall stairs in the dark. 
The doctor himself died suddenly, though he has 
often been seen since in a grand brocade dressing- 
gown and close velvet cap. His business affairs had 
naturally become a good deal tangled, but no one 


26 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


knew how much so until after his death. For several 
jrears he had been in the habit of carrying back and 
/orth a little padlocked box when he went to Ports¬ 
mouth, which was supposed to hold money and valua¬ 
ble papers ; but when this was brought home from 
the bank, and broken open, it was found to contain 
only blank bits of paper. 

His wife, whom the old people in town still re 
member, must have had a hard time of it in the 
house on the wharf after she was left a widow; but 
she was still the grande dame., and when she went 
into society her old laces and silks and her fine man¬ 
ners made her the queen of her company. She gave 
no sigh of disappointment at her altered fortunes, and 
as long as the doctor lived and after he died, she was 
as serenely magnificent and untroubled as he. The 
Guard could die, but it never surrendered, and the 
old prestige was kept up bravely. She lived alone, 
and might sometimes have needed many of the good 
things of life, for all one knows; but she was always 
well dressed, and kept up all possible forms of state, 
and was rigorous in observing all rules of etiquette. 
By way of doing a great favor to one of her neigh¬ 
bors, she allowed a stranger the use of one of her 
rooms for a short time, and this person used to hear 
a bell ring in the morning, after which Madam Hovey 



RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


27 


would move about in her room ; then she would go 
down-stairs, breakfast being apparently announced; 
and so on, through the day. There was often a bell 
heard tinkling in the parlor; she would apologize for 
opening the outer door herself, and when the lodger 
called the mistress of the house was always quite at 
liberty, and seemed to have been awaiting guests in 
her parlor, with a bit of lace to mend in her fingers, 
or some silk knitting, as if she occupied her leisure 
with such dainty trifles. It was some time before 
the lodger discovered, to her amazement, that there 
was not a servant under the roof to do my lady’s bid¬ 
ding, but that she still kept up the old customs of the 
house. Poor soul! it was not all silly pretense. If 
I were to spend a night (which the saints forbid !) 
in that beloved mansion Avhere she lived in solitary 
majesty for so many years, I should not expect to be 
the guest of the proud doctor’s first companion whose 
death is shrouded in mystery, who cries dismally and 
walks to and fro in the night, to beg for pity and 
help. I should look over my shoulder for the lady 
in the high turban, with a red India shawl around 
her shoulders, who stood so straight, and used to 
walk up the aisle to her seat in church on Sunday as 
if she were a duchess. The cries and the steps be¬ 
hind me would be most annoying, but Madam Hovey, 


28 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


if she also haunts her house, would receive me ele¬ 
gantly. One can imagine her alone in her house at 
night, with the jar of the river falls and the wind 
rattling her windows, fearful of her future, and of 
the poverty and misery old age held in its shaking 
hands for her. But she carried a brave face in the 
daylight, however troubled she may have been under 
the stars, and she gave to the towns-people the best 
of lessons in behavior ; for she was always gracious 
and courteous, and fine in her own manners, a high¬ 
bred lady, who had been in her day a most apt 
scholar of the old school. 

My cruises down the river rarely reach beyond 
High Point, or Pine Point, or the toll-bridge; but 
one is tempted to linger there late for the sake of the 
beautiful view. The salt grass is a dazzling green, 
if the time is early summer and the tide is partly 
out, and from the bridge to the Hamilton house 
the river is very wide. The fine old house faces 
you, and at its right there is a mountain, which is a 
marked feature in the landscape on a clear day, when 
it looks far away and blue in the distance. The 
great tops of the Hamilton elms look round and 
heavy against the sky, and the shores of the river are 
somewhat irregular, running out in points which ar^ 
for the most part heavily wooded, and form back 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


29 


grounds of foliage for each other. Being at different 
angles, the light and shade of each are distinct, and 
make a much finer coloring and outline than could be 
if the line of the shore were unbroken by so many 
bays and inlets. It is very pleasant to push the boat 
ashore in one of these coves, for in the little ravines 
that lead down to them there are crowds of ferns and 
wild flowers, and it is easy to find exactly the place 
for a little feast at supper time. I know many a 
small harbor on the eastern shore, where a willow or 
a birch stands out in front of the dark evergreens, 
and at one place an oak reaches its long branches far 
out over the water; and when you are once under its 
shade, and watch the sunset grow bright and then 
fade away again, or see the boats go round the point 
from the wide bay into the narrow reach of the river 
above it, and listen to the bells ringing in the village 
or in some town farther away, you hate to think you 
must take the oars again, and go out into the twilight 
Lr the bright sunshine of the summer afternoon. 

I miss very much some poplars which stood on the 
western shore, opposite the great house, and which 
were not long since cut down. They were not 
flourishing, but they were like a little procession of 
a father and mother and three or four children out 
(or an afternoon walk, coming down througli the field 


30 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


to the river. As you rowed up or down they stood 
up in bold relief against the sky, for they were on 
high land. I was deeply attached to them, and in the 
spring, when I went down river for the first time, 
they always were covered with the first faint green 
mist of their leaves, and it seemed as if they had been 
watching for me, and thinking that perhaps I might 
go by that afternoon. 

On a spring day how the bobolinks sing, and the 
busy birds that live along the shores go flitting and 
chirping and whistling about the world! A great 
fish-hawk drops through the air, and you can see 
the glitter of the unlucky fish he has seized as he 
goes off again. The fields and trees have a tinge of 
green that they will keep only for a few days, until 
the leaves and grass-blades are larger and stronger ; 
and where the land has been plowed its color is as 
beautiful as any color that can be found the world 
over, and the long shining brown furrows grow warm 
lying in the sun. The farmers call to each other 
and to their horses as they work ; the fresh breeze 
blows from the southwest, and the frogs are cheerful, 
and the bobolinks grow more and more pleased with 
themselves every minute, and sing their tunes, which 
are meant to be sung slower and last longer, as U 
the sweet notes all came hurrying out together. 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. Si 

And in the summer, when the days are hot and 
long, there is nothing better than the glory of the 
moonlighted nights, when the shrill cries of the in¬ 
sects fill all the air, and the fireflies are everywhere, 
and a whiff of saltness comes up with the tide. Iji 
October the river is bright steel color and blue. The 
ducks rise and fly away from the coves in the early 
morning, and the oaks and maples dress themselves 
as they please, as if they were tired of wearing plain 
green, like everybody else, and were going to be gay 
and set a new fashion in the cooler weather. You no 
longer drift lazily with the current, but pull your 
boat as fast as you can, and are quick and strong with 
the oars. And in the winter the river looks cold and 
dead, the wind blows up and down between the hills, 
and the black pines and hemlocks stare at each other 
across the ice, which cracks and creaks loudly when 
the tide comes up and lifts it. 

How many men have lived and died on its banks, 
but the river is always young. How many sailors 
have gone down to the sea along its channel, and 
from what strange countries have the ships come in 
and brought them home again up this crooked high¬ 
way ! A harbor, even if it is a litile harbor, is a 
good thing, since adventurers come into it as wef 


52 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it 
takes something from the world, and has something 
to give in return. Not the sheltering shores of Eng¬ 
land, but the inhospitable low coasts of Africa and 
the. dangerous islands of the southeris seas, are left 
unvisited. One sees the likeness between a harbor¬ 
less heart and a harborless country, where no ships 
go and come ; and since no treasure is carried away 
no treasure is brought in. From this inland town of 
mine there is no sea faring any more, and the ship¬ 
wrights’ hammers are never heard now. It is only 
a station on the railways, and it has, after all these 
years, grown so little that it is hardly worth while 
for all the trains to stop. It is busy and it earns its 
living and enjoys itself, but it seems to me that its 
old days were its better days. It builds cheaper 
houses, and is more like other places than it used to 
be. The people of fifty years ago had some things 
that were better than ours, even if they did not hear 
from England by telegraph, or make journeys in a 
day or two that used to take a week. The old elms 
and pines look strong yet, though once in a while one 
blows over or is relentlessly cut down. The willows 
by the river are cropped and cropped again. The 
river itself never grows old; though it rushes and 


RIVER DRIFTWOOD. 


33 


rises high in the spring, it never dries up in the au¬ 
tumn ; the little white sails flit over it in pleasant 
weather, like fluttering moths round the track of sun¬ 
light on the water ; one troop of children after an¬ 
other steals eagerly down to its forbidden shores to 
play. 

3 




ANDREW’S EORTUNE. 


T was a cold day early in December, and al 
ready almost dark, though the sun had just 
gone down, leaving a tinge of light red, the 
least beautiful of all the sunset colors, on the low 
gray clouds in the southwest. The weather W'as for¬ 
lorn and windy, and there had already been a light 
fall of snow, which partly covered the frozen ground, 
and was lying in the hollows of the fields and past¬ 
ures and alongside the stone walls, where the wind 
liad blown it to get it ont of its way. The country 
was uneven and heavily wooded ; the few houses in 
sight looked cold and winterish, as if the life in them 
shared the sleep of tlie grass and trees, and would 
not show itself again until spring. Yet winter is the 
leisure time of country people, and it is then, in spite 
of the frequent misery of the weather, that their so¬ 
cial pleasures come into stunted bloom. The young 








ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


3r) 

people frolic for a while, but they soon outgrow it, 
and each rising generation is looked upon with scorn 
by its elders and betters for thinking there is any 
pleasure in being out-of-doors in cold weather. No 
wonder that a New England woman cheers herself 
by leaving her own sewing and going to the parish 
society to sit close to an air-tight stove and sew for 
other people ; how should she dance and sing like an 
Italian peasant under a blue and kindly sky ! There 
should have been another Sphinx on some vast north¬ 
ern waste where it is forever cold weather, and the 
great winds always blow, and generations after gen¬ 
erations of people have lived and died. Life is no 
surprise on the banks of the fertile old Nile, it could 
not help being, but the spirit of the North seems de¬ 
structive ; life exists in spite of it. 

Along the country road a short, stout-built woman, 
well wrapped with shawls, was going from her own 
home, a third of a mile back, to the next house, 
where there were already lights in one of the upper 
^nd one of the lower rooms. She said to herself. 
He must be livin’ yet,” and stepped a little faster, 
even climbing a low wall and going across a field to 
shorten the distance. She seemed to be in a great 
hurry, and as she went she left behind her a track of 
oroken-down golden-rod stalks and dry stems of grass 


36 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


which had been standing, frozen and dry, with tha 
thin snow about their roots. “ land sakes, how this 
field has run out! ” said she, not without contempt; 
“l»ut I don’ know’s I ever expect to see it bettered.*’ 
She opened the side door of the house and w^eiit 
into the kitchen, where several persons were sitting. 
There was a great fire blazing in the fire-place, and 
a little row of mugs and tw^o bowls, each covered 
with a plate, stood at one side of the hearth to keep 
warm, as if tliere were somebody ill in the house. 
And sure enough there was, for old Stephen Dennett, 
its master, was nearly at the end of his short last 
sickness. There w^ere three women and two men in 
the kitchen, and they greeted the new-comer with 
subdued cordiaiiiy, as was befitting; it was a little 
like a funeral already, and they did not care to be 
found cheerful, though, to tell the truth, just before 
Mrs. Haynes came in they solemnly drank a pitcher 
of old Mr. Dennett’s best cider, urging each other to 
take some, for there was no knowing that there might 
not be a good deal for them all to do before long. 
With this end in view of keeping up their strength, 
they had also shared a mince pie and a large quan¬ 
tity of cheese. “ We’d better eat while we can,’ 
said old Betsey Morris, who was hostess, having been 
housekeeper at the farm for a good many years. “ 1 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


37 


ion’t feel’s if I could lay the table,” said she, with 
unaffected emotion, and the mourners in prospective 
begged her not to think of it; but they were hungry, 
hard-working men and women, and were all glad to 
have somethinj; to eat. When some douglitiuts were 
brought out they ate those also, all trying in vain to 
think of some apology for such good appetites at such 
a moment; but since they had to be silent the feast 
was all the more solemn. 

It was evident that the sickness was either sudden, 
or had become serious within a very short time, for 
the family affairs had gone on as usual. It seemed 
as if the household had been taken unawares by the 
messenger of Death, and surprised in the midst of 
fancied security. It was Wednesday, and the clothes- 
horse, covered with the white folds of yesterday's 
ironing, stood in one corner of the kitchen, while the 
smaller horse, which Betsey Morris always facetiously 
called the colt, was nearer the fire, with its burden of 
flannels and blue yarn stockings. It was a comfort¬ 
able old kitchen, with a beam across its ceiling, and 
two solid great tables, and a settle at one side the 
fire, where the two men sat who were going to watch. 
The fire-place took up nearly all one side of the 
room ; the wood-work around it was painted black, 
And at one side the iron door of the brick oven looked 


38 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


as if it might be the entrance to a very small dun¬ 
geon. There was a high and narrow mai tel-shelf, 
where a row of flat-irons were perched like birds gone 
to roost; also a match-box, and a turkey-wing, and a 
few very dry red peppers ; while a yellow-covered 
Thomas’s Almanac, — much worn, it being Decem¬ 
ber, — was hanging on its nail at one corner. There 
was a tall clock in the room, which ticked so slowly 
that one fancied it must always make waiting seem 
very tiresome, and that one of its hours must be as 
long as two. On one of the tables there was a spare- 
rib which had been brought in to thaw. Jonas 
Beedle and Nathan Martin sat on the settle, while 
Mrs. Beedle and Mrs. Goodsoe and Betsey Morris 
were at different distances from the fire in splint-bot¬ 
tomed chairs. They had seen Mrs. Haynes coming 
across the field, — it was still light enough out-doors 
for tliat,—but they had not spoken of it to each 
other, though they put the cider-jug and the rest of 
the doughnuts into the closet as quickly as possible. 

“ I told ’em one day last week,” said Jonas Beedle, 
that Stephen seemed to be all wizened up since 
cold weather come. Why, here’s Mis’ Haynes I 
Take a cheer right close to the fire, now won’t ye 
It ’s a dreadful chilly night. We’ve just ben a-hav 
hi’ some ci— ” 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


39 


“ Yes,” said his wife, nudging and inten-upting him 
desperately. “We was just a-sayin’ we wondered 
where you was, but I misdoubted you was n’t able to 
be out on account of your neurology.” 

“I went over to Ann’s this morning,” said Mrs. 
Haynes, still a little out of breath from her walk, 
“ One o’ her children’s took down with throat dis¬ 
temper, and she expects the rest ’ll get it. Joseph, 
lie brought in word after dinner that somebody goin’ 
by said Mr. Dennett had a shock this morning, and 
wa’n’t likely to come out of it, and I told ’em I must 
get right home. 1 felt’s if’t was one o’ my own 
folks. How does he seem to be ? ” 

“ Laying in a sog,” said Betsey Morris for the 
twentieth time that day. “ The doctor says there 
ain’t much he can do. He had me make some brotb 
and teas, and he left three kinds o’ medicine, — 
there’s somethin’ steeping now in them mugs, ie, 
case he revives up. He said we could feed him k 
little to a time if he come to any, and if we could 
keep his strength up he might get out of it. He ’a 
comino: again about six. He was took dreadful sud- 
den. I was washin’ up the dishes after breakfast, 
and he said he was goin’ over to the Corners: there 
vas a selec’men’s meeting. He eat as good a break¬ 
fast as common, but he seemed sort of heavy. He 


40 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


went out and put the boss in, and left him in the 
barn, and come back to get his coat. Says he, ‘ Is 
there anything you ’re in need of from the store, 
Betsey ’ It looks like foul weather.’ And I says. 
No. I little thought it was the last time he’d speak 
to me,” and she stopped to dry her eyes with her 
j,{)ron, while the sympathetic audience was quiet in 
the firelight, and the tea-kettle began to sing as if it 
had no idea of what had happened. “ He always was 
the best o’ providers. It was only one day last week 
he was a-joking and saying he was going to keep me 
better this year tlian ever he did. Says he, ‘ I’m 
going to take my comfort and live well long’s I do 
live.’ There’s everything in the house ; w'e killed 
early, and there’s the other hog he set for the first o’ 
January; and he’s put down a kag of excellent beef. 
The sullar’s got enough in it for a rigiment, I told 
him only yesterday ; and says he, ‘ Betsey, don’t you 
know it’s better to have some to spare than some to 
w^ant ? ’ I can see him laugh now.” 

“ There’s plenty will need it, if he don’t,” said 
Mrs. Goodsoe, who w^as a dismal, grasping soul, and 
«at farthest from the fire. 

Mrs. Haynes gathered herself up scornfully, — she 
did not like her neighbor. “ You were a-sayin’ he 
was going to the selec’men’s meeting,” said she. 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE, 


41 


“ Tes,” said Betsey. “ He said he’d got to get 
Bome papers, and I offered to fetch ’em; but he never 
wanted to be waited on ; and he went up-stairs, — I 
s’pose to that old chist o’ drawers overhead. I heard 
a noise like something heavy a-falling; and my first 
thought was he’d tipped the chist o’ drawers over, 
for I know the lower drawers, where the sheets and 
pillow-cases is kept, sticks sometimes; and then 
sometliing started me, and come across me, quick as 
a flash, that there was something wrong, and I got 
up stairs as quick as ever I could, and found him lay¬ 
ing on the floor.” 

“ I s’pose he did n’t know nothin’ ? ” asked Mrs. 
Haynes. 

“ Bless you, no ! I tried to get him up, and I 
found I could n’t. I thought he was dead, but I see 
Jim Pierce a-goin’ by, — he was some use for once 
in his life,—and I sent him for help. Mis’ Beedle 
come right over, bein’ so near, and Jim met the doc¬ 
tor up the road, and we got him into bed, and there 
he lays. It give me a dreadful start. I ain’t myself 
yet.” 

“ Andrer’s here, I s’pose,” said Mrs. Haynes, as if 
she thought it of very little consequence. 

Yes,” said Betsey. “ He’d walked over to the 
saw-mill right after breakfast to carry word about 


42 


COUNTRY BY-WATS. 


some boards bis uncle wanted, but be got back just 
as tbe doctor was leavin’. He’s been real faithful; 
he ain’t left tbe old gentleman a minute. He’s all 
broke down, be feels so. I never saw bim so dis¬ 
tressed ; be ain’t one that shows his feelin’s much of 
any.” 

I think likely he ’ll be married right away now,” 
said Mr. Martin. “ Stephen told me in the summer 
that he’d left him about everything. He ain’t no 
such a man as his uncle, but I don’t know no harm 
of Andrew.” A silence fell between the guests, and 
the fire snapped once in a while and made such a 
light that the one little oil lamp might have beoii 
blown out for all the good it did ; nobody would ha'»’*3 
missed it. 

“ I told our folks last night there was going to be 
a death over this way,” said Mrs. Goodsoe. “ I was 
a-looking out o’ the window over this way last night 
just before I went to bed, and I see a great bright 
light come down ; and I says, There’s a great blaze 
fallen over Dennett’s way, and my father always said 
it was a sure sign of a death. ‘ He ’ laughed, and 
Bays my eyes was dazzled from setting before the fire. 
I’d like to know what he ’ll say when he hears o 
this,” — triumphantly. “He went up to the wood 
^ot, chopping, before day.” 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


43 


‘‘ I did hear a death-tick in the wall after I went 
to bed, two or three nights ago,” said Betsey Morris; 
and then there was another pause. 

“ 1 s’pose I might go up easy and jist look in, bein’ 
a connection,” ventured Mrs. Haynes meekly ; and 
luckily nobody opposed her. In fact, they had all 
had that satisfaction. 

“You might ask Andrer if he could n’t rise his 
uncle’s head by and by, so I could give him a little 
o’ the broth ; he ain’t eat the value o’ nothin’ since 
morning, and he’s a hearty man when he’s about,” 
suggested Betsey. 

“ You ought to help natur’ all you can,” said Na¬ 
than IMartin ; and armed with this sufficient excuse 
Mrs. Haynes went up-stairs softly. 

Andrew Phillips sat by the bedside, looking as dis¬ 
mal as possible, — a thin, dark young man with a 
pleasant sort of face, yet you always felt at once that 
you could get on just as well without him. “ Per¬ 
haps we had better wait now until the doctor comes,” 
answered he when he heard the message from Bet¬ 
sey. “ Do sit down, Mrs. Haynes. I have been 
wishing somebody would come up, — it’s lonesome 
since it got dark. Susan has n’t sent any word, has 
she ? I sent Jim Pierce over right after dinner, but 
I suppose he stopped in at every house ” — 


44 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


“ Not as I ’ve heard of,” said Mrs. Haynes. “I’ve 
only just got here. I was over to Ann’s to spend a 
day or so, and I never got word about y’r uncle till 
past two o’clock. How does he seem to be ? ” 

“ I don’t know,” said the young man. “ He’s lost 
that red look, but he seems to have failed all away; ” 
and they both went close to the bed to look at the 
face on the pillow, which showed at once that Death 
had come very near. The old man’s eyes were shut, 
and he looked pinched and sunken, and as if he were 
ten years older than in the morning. One hand that 
lay outside the bed moved a little, and the fingers 
picked at the blanket. “ He has n’t stirred all day 
except his arm, and that hand once in a while, as you 
see it now.” 

Mrs. Haynes knew better than he what it meant, 
and she gave a long look and turned away with a 
heavy sigh. “ He’s death-struck,” she whispered, 
“ but he may hold out for a good spell yet. He’s 
been a master strong man ; I should ha’ said yester¬ 
day he had as good a chance as any one of us. He’s 
been the best neighbor I ever had, I know that,” and 
she sat down by the fire, and did not speak for a 
while. She had not taken it in that her old nemh- 

O 

bor was nearing his end until she saw him, and her 
excitement and curiosity at hearing the news gave 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


45 


to sincere sorrow. “ He ’ll be a great loss,” 
laid she in a changed voice, after some little time. 
“ I do’ know but I shall miss him more than anybody, 
except it was one of our own folks.” 

“ He’s been like father and mother both to me,” 
answered the young man, sorrowfully. “ I can’t 
bear to think of getting along without him.” 

“ Yes, you ’ll have to look out for yourself now, 
Andrer,” said Mrs. Haynes. “ I don’t know’s you ’re 
to blame for not being of a turn for farming, but I 
s’pose you ’ll have a wife to look after, and it’s a 
poor sort of a man that can’t keep what’s give to 
him. Susan’s a good smart girl; it ’ll be a great 
thing for you to have a stirrin’ wife.” Andrew 
winced at this thrust, which had not been given 
through any malice, for Mrs. Haynes was a kind- 
hearted woman, if she did happen to be a little want¬ 
ing in tact. “You’ll have to put right to it, next 
summer, to fetch the place up. I come across the 
seven-acre piece to save time as I come along, and 
it’s run out dreadfully within a year or two. It 
did n’t look to me as if it would be fit for much more 
than pasture, unless it had a sight laid out on it. I 
don’t see how the old gentleman come to neglect it 
60 ; he used to take a good deal of pains with that 
piece years ago, — he cut a sight of hay off of it one 
pell.” 


46 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS, 


It seemed heartless to young Phillips that she 
should speak slightingly of the man who lay there 
unable to defend himself. “ He has been breaking 
up this good while,” said he, “ but I never seemed to 
see it before.” 

Down in the kitchen the neighbors were talking 
together. The pitcher of cider had come from the 
very oldest barrel in the cellar, and it had set the 
tongues of the company wagging. Mrs. Goodsoe 
had gone home ; she said with a heavy sigh that 
there was nobody but herself to do anything, and she 
would be over again before bed-time if her lameness 
was n’t too bad. She tied a great brown-checked 
gingham handkerchief over her head, and pinned a 
despairing old black shawl tight round her thin shoul¬ 
ders, and went out into the night. 

“ If you can make it convenient, I hope you ’ll be 
over in the morning, Mis’ Goodsoe,” said Betsey. 

“ If it’s so that I can,” groaned the departing 
guest. 

“ She would n’t miss of it,” snapped Mrs. Beedle, 
as the door was shut. And Betsey answered, — 

‘‘ There ! I did n’t want her no more ’n an old fly 
and she always did make my flesh creep, but I knew 
Mr. Dennett would n’t want nobody’s feelings hurt.” 

“I don’t see what folks always wants to be com 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


47 


pJaining for,” said Mrs. Beedle. “ She always was 
just so when she was a girl. Nothin’ ever suits her. 
She ain’t had no more troubles to bear than the rest 
of us, but you never see her that she did n’t have a 
rhapter to lay before ye. I’ve got’s much feelin’ as 
the next one, but when folks drives in their spiggits 
and wants to draw a bucketful o’ compassion every 
day right straiglit along, there does come times when 
it seems as if the bar’l was getting low.” 

Mr. Beedle and Betsey chuckled a little over this, 
approvingly. Mr. Martin was dozing at his end of 
the settle, but presently he roused himself, and asked 
Mr. Beedle, drowsily, ‘‘ Do ye know what Otis got 
for them sticks o’ rock-maple ? ” 

“ I don’t,” said Mr. Beedle ; “ they ’re for ship tim¬ 
ber, I understood. I heard yisterday he was going 
to cut some o’ them white oaks near his house, the 
second-sized ones ; they was extra nice ones for keels 
o’ vessels, I was told.” 

“ They ain’t suitable for keels,” said Nathan scorn¬ 
fully. He had once worked in a ship-yard, and was 
always delighted .to parade his superior knowledge 
before his land-locked neighbors. “ They might be 
going to use them for kilsons or sister-kilsons.” This 
was added after grave reflection, and Mr. Beedle tried 
to remember what part of a ship a sister-keelson was 


48 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


but he could not do it; and he asked Betsey Morris 
for the lantern, and the two men went out to the 
barn to look after the cattle, leaving the women alone 
together. 

“Mis’ Haynes seems to be stopping up-stairs quite 
a while,” said Mrs. Beedle, 

“ I expect Andrer’s glad to have her ; he ain’t 
much used to sickness. Poor Andrer! I expect 
he ’ll take it very hard, losing of his uncle,” said 
Betsey. 

“ Well, I tell ye a fat sorrow’s a good sight easier 
to bear than a lean one ; and then he’s got Susan. 
How that girl, that might have taken her pick, ever 
come to take up with Andrer Phillips is more ’n I 
know.” (Mrs. Beedle’s own daughter had at one 
time paid Andrew a good deal of attention.) “ She 
wa’n’t one to drop like a ripe apple off a bough the 
first time she got asked.” 

“ Now Mis’ Beedle,” said Betsey with a good deal 
of spirit, “ Andrer ain’t the worst fellow that ever 
was. She might ha’ done a good deal worse, even if 
he wa’n’t expectin’ property. I don’t doubt she had 
an eye to the means, myself, but he’s stiddy as a 
clock, and his uncle always said he had a good mind. 
He ain’t had to work for his livin’; and the old sir 
tiever was one that wanted to give up the reins. He 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


49 


Expected the boy to live here after him, and he never 
had it on his mind to put him to a trade. He ’ll 
make a farmer yet; there’s a sight o’ girls turns out 
good housekeepers that never had no care before they 
was married. And Andrer’s got a sight o’ book- 
earnin’.” 

“ Book-learnin’! ” said Mrs. Beedle, with a jerk 
of her head. “ He’s a book-fool, if ever there was 
one. But I ain’t goiu’ to set in judgment,” she added 
in a different tone, suddenly mindful that the young 
man was likely to be her nearest and richest neigh¬ 
bor in a few hours. “ I always set everything by 
his mother. Her and me was the same year’s child’n, 
and was fetched up together. Don’t ever hint I said 
anything that was n’t pleasant. I ain’t one that 
wants to make trouble, and he ’ll find me a good 
neighbor. Anybody has to speak out sometimes.” 

“ I ain’t one to make trouble, neither,” said Betsey. 
“ I’ve wondered sometimes, myself, he did n’t spudge 
up and be somebody; his uncle never would ha’ 
thwarted him, but then he never give a sign he was n’t 
satisfied. And Andrer never give him a misbeholden 
word, — I can answer for that.” 

The doctor came and went, telling the women that 
he could not say how long the patient might last. 

“ I s’pose folks knows of it all ove» town ? ” asked 
4 


50 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


Betsey, meekly conscious of the importance of the 
occasion and her own consequence. 

“ Yes, yes,” said the doctor, who stood warming 
his great fur coat before the fire, having declined the 
offer of supper or something hot, for he was in a 
hurry to get home. His gig rattled away out of the 
yard, and silence once more fell on the house. An¬ 
drew came down-stairs for a little while, looking 
grieved and tired, and said that he meant to watch, 
at least until midnight; the doctor thought that his 
uncle might be conscious before he died. Then Mrs. 
Haynes came down, and after a while Mrs. Beedle 
and Betsey tiptoed up the stairs, and as they listened 
outside the door they heard some one speaking. 

You don’t suppose he’s got his reason ? ” whis¬ 
pered one to the other, and they waited a minute oi 
two ; it was very cold in the little entry. 

“ Yes, sir,” they heard Andrew say gently, “ you 
’ve had an ill turn ; ” and then all was silent again. 

“ I must n’t forget those town orders. I can’t seem 
to think where they are,” said a weak voice that was 
as unlike as possible the cheerful loud tone in which 
Mr. Dennett had usually spoken. 

“ Don’t tr}^ to think, uncle,” said Andrew. “ Don’t 
you feel as if you could eat a little broth ? ” Bu/ 
there was no "answer. 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


51 


“ I sha’n’t stand for selec’man another jear; it *s a 
good deal o’ trouble,” said the weak voice, after a 
minute or two. 

“ He thinks it’s this mornin’, poor creator’,” whis¬ 
pered Betsey. “ I guess I ’ll step down and get that 
broth ; what do you think ? Perhaps he would take 
a little.” But when she came back she found it was 
not wanted. Mrs. Beedle had gone in, and the mas¬ 
ter of the house lay dying. They stood by the bed¬ 
side watching, with awe-struck faces, while the mortal 
part of him fought fiercely for a minute to keep its 
soul, which had gently and surely taken itself away. 
There was this minute of distress and agony, and 
afterward the tired and useless body was still. The 
old man’s face took on a sweet and strange look of 
satisfaction, — a look of rest, as if it found its sleep 
of death most welcome and pleasant. So soon it 
was over, the going away which the bravest of us 
shudder at sometimes and dread ; but dying seems 
after all, to those who watch it oftenest, a simple and 
natural and blessed thing, and one forgets the lifeless 
body in a sudden eagerness to follow the living soul 
into the new world. 

The funeral was appointed for Saturday, and every¬ 
body was busy. Andrew instinctively took command, 
tnd Betsey and the women who came to help her 


52 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


consulted him with unwonted deference. The house 
had to be swept and dusted and put in order, and 
there were great preparations going on in the kitchen ; 
for old Mr. Dennett had been a hospitable man, and 
it should not be said that any one went away from 
his house hungry. 

“ I declare, it don’t seem more than yesterday it 
was Thanksgiving, and he made me make up double 
the mince pies I did last year. I little thought what 
they was going to be for,” said Betsey Morris, whose 
heart was very sad. 

The morning after Mr. Dennett had died, a letter 
came for him from an old friend in Boston, who had 
left that part of the country in his boyhood, and had 
made his fortune and. become rich and prominent. 
None of his own family were living there, and he 
claimed Mr. Dennett’s hospitality on the score of 
their early friendship and the occasional business let¬ 
ters which had passed between -them since. Andrew 
was a little afraid at first to tell -Betsey of this addi¬ 
tional care, but she received the news graciously. 
She said, mournfully, how pleased tiae old gentleman 
would have been ; but she thought also that she would 
show the city guest that they knew h-ow to do things 
if they did live in the country, and ?;ince her pride as 
ft housekeeper was put to its utmost*; “est, she was no* 


ANDREW'S FORT ONE. 53 

sorry to have so worthy a spectator among her au¬ 
dience. 

But a new interest quickly followed this, for one 
of the women whispered to another that Andrew 
could not find the will. He had supposed that it was 
safe in the keeping of old Mr. Estes, who was the 
only lawyer in that region ; but Mr. Estes had hap¬ 
pened to say that two or three weeks before, Mr. 
Dennett had taken it home with him. Andrew was 
told that it was written on a sheet of blue letter-paper, 
and sealed with a wafer. 

‘‘ I looked all through the papers in the desk up¬ 
stairs,” said he to Mrs. Haynes, “ and in my uncle’s 
coat pockets, but 1 can’t seem to find it.” It was an 
evident relief to tell this, and Mrs. Haynes was at 
once much interested. “ It must have slipped be¬ 
tween some of the other things, or he may have tied 
it up with some old bills, or something, by mistake. 
I suppose Betsey don’t know ? ” 

But she did not, and was deeply concerned, for she 
' had long indulged hopes of a legacy. She helped 
Andrew look all through the pigeon-holes again, and 
in every likely and unlikely place they could think 
of; but it was no use, and the fear took possession 
9 f them that Mr. Dennett might have destroyed it, 
meaning to make another will, and never had done 
lO. 


54 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


“ He told me only a week or two ago,” said An¬ 
drew, “ that everything was going' to be mine, and I 
might do as I chose. I was speaking to him about 
the barn ; you know he had set his mind on altering 
it. I don’t know what to think,” and he went to the 
bedside and lifted the sheet from the dead man’s face ; 
but he looked white and indifferent, and kept his se¬ 
crets. 

The days crept by until Saturday, and each night 
two neighbors came to watch, after the old custom ; 
and those who were lying awake in the house could 
hear them every little while tramp up the stairs and 
down again, and the grumble of their voices as they 
talked together in the kitchen, trying to keep them¬ 
selves awake. On Friday Mr. Dunning came, and 
was shocked to find that the only person he really 
cared very much to see had so lately died ; but he 
accepted Andrew’s invitation, and made up his mind 
to stay until the funeral, discovering that it was ex¬ 
pected of him and looked upon as desirable. There 
was a strange contrast between him and his old 
friend ; the city man looked much younger in his 
well-fitting clothes, and his quick, business-like man 
ner gave him an air of youth which was in great con¬ 
trast to Mr. Dennett’s slow, farmer-like ways. As 
he had grown older he had found himself thinking 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


55 


more and more about the people he had known when 
he was a boy, and the places where he had worked 
and played. It seemed strange at first to see hardly 
any familiar faces, and he had a curious sense of lone¬ 
liness as he sat, himself an object of great interest, 
among the mourners ; and the pomp and piety of the 
old-fashioned country funeral interested him not a 
little. The people gathered from far and near to 
pay respect to the good man who had died; and they 
came in by twos and threes, with solemn faces, to 
look at him, and many of them touched his face, lest 
they might have bad dreams of him. It was the first 
time his friends had come to his house and he had 
not welcomed them, but he lay in his coffin unmind¬ 
ful of them all, looking strange and priest-like in the 
black robe in which they had shrouded him. It was 
a bleak, cold day, and he would have looked more 
comfortable, and certainly more familiar, in his own 
old coat that was faded a little on the shoulders. 

Betsey Morris was dressed in proper black, and 
was crying softly, with a big pocket handkerchief 
held close to her face, which she occasionally moved 
aside a little as tlie people came in, to dart a glance 
at them. Andrew looked worn and anxious. Every 
one told him that the will must be found, but he was 
by no means certain, and if it did not come to light 


56 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


he was left penniless. He was only the nephew of 
Stephen Dennett’s wife, and though he had been al¬ 
ways treated as a son he had never been formally 
adopted. Several people noticed that he had a manly 
look that they never had seen before, but for his part 
he felt helpless and adrift. 

After a long and solemn silence the old minister 
rose to speak of the departed pillar of the cl lurch and 
town, as he called Mr. Dennett, and the old clock in 
the kitchen ticked louder than ever in the hush that 
followed. After the remarks were ended he lifted 
the great Bible which was lying ready on the light 
stand, and read slowly and reverently the short and 
solemn last chapter of Ecclesiastes ; and, though there 
were fewer young people to heed the preacher’s warn¬ 
ing than old people to regret their long delay, it 
seemed to fit the occasion best. “ Or even the silver 
cord be loosed, or the golden bowl broken,” he read 
in his trembling voice ; “ for man goeth to his long 
home, and tlie mourners go about the streets.” Ha 
thought of his kind friend and generous parishioner, 
and it was said afterward that, though the old parson 
was an able preacher and gifted in prayer, he never 
\iad spoken as he did that day. He knew this chapter 
by heart; he had read it at many a funeral before 
and ho repeated the last few verses, lowering the 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


57 


Bible as he held it in his arms, for it was heavy 
And out from between the leaves slid a thin folded 
paper, which went wavering through the air to the 
floor ; it was sealed with a big red wafer, and one or 
two persons who sat close by and saw it, knew by a 
sudden instinct that it was the missing will. 

Andrew Phillips turned very pale for a moment, 
and then as suddenly flushed. lie started from Ids 
chair, but his respect for the time and place checked 
him, and with great propriety he nodded to the old 
woman at whose feet it had fallen, — a distant con¬ 
nection of the family, a feeble, wheezing old creature, 
— who had made a great effort to be present. She 
stooped over stiffly and picked it up; she looked as if 
it were only a commonplace paper, which must not 
litter the floor on such a day. The minister had al¬ 
ready begun his prayer, but when he besought the 
Lord that the memory of the departed might be a les¬ 
son, and that the young man on whom his mantle was 
to fall might prove himself worthy of it, Andrew 
prayed for himself still more heartily, and before the 
coffin-lid was screwed down he bent over and kissed 
his uncle’s forehead. Some of the women’s eyes filled 
with tears ; he might not be a go-ahead young man, 
but his fondness for his uncle was unaffected, and, be 
\ng his uncle’s heir and standing in his place, his feel 


58 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


mgs were much more to be respected than if he were 
still a dependent. 

When the mourners were called out he meant, as 
he went by old Mrs. Towner’s chair, to take the will, 
lie had tried to call her attention, and make her un¬ 
derstand that he wanted the paper; but she was dull 
of sight, and sat there watching the proceedings with 
intense interest. Andrew was shy, and he had a hor¬ 
ror of seeming anxious about the property before all 
the people; and when he and Betsey were called (Mr. 
Lysander Dennett and family, the only cousins, not 
responding), he went out into the yard, a little un¬ 
easy at heart, to take his place at the head of the pro¬ 
cession. 

They walked two by two across the wind-blown 
field to the little family burying-ground. It was a 
long procession, and the doctor was one of the mourn¬ 
ers ; he had pleaded in vain critical cases in the next 
town, for his wife, mindful of the exactions of society, 
would not hear to any excuses. He shivered and 
grumbled as he walked with her to the grave. “ I 
shall be out every night for a week after this, looking 
after lung fevers,” said he. “ I don’t see why people 
must go through with just so much ! ” and he hastily 
brushed away a cold tear that had started down his 
theek when he caught sight of the clumsy coffin as it 


ANDREW^S FORTUNE. 


59 


was carried unevenly along in the hands of the bear¬ 
ers. He had been deeply attached to old Mr. Den¬ 
nett, but the people who walked before him thought 
he showed very little feeling. When they were near¬ 
ing the house again some one came running out and 
spoke to the'doctor, who followed him hurriedly ; the 
word was passed from one to another that old widow 
'I'owner was in some kind of a fit, and Andrew’s first 
thought was of the will, for it was she who had it in 
her pocket. 

She had stayed behind to keep the house, being so 
feeble, and spent with a long walk in the cold. 
“ Foolish for old people to be out in such perishing 
weather,” said the doctor to himself as he bent over 
her. “ She’s gone, poor soul,” he told the startled 
people who were crowding round him. She was lying 
near the fire-place, on the kitchen floor ; she had been 
putting on some wood. “ I ’ve been expecting this, 
— she’s had a heart complaint these twenty years,” 
said the doctor. 

And the will had disappeared again. They looked 
in her pocket, but it was not there, and there was no 
race of it anywhere ; only at the side of the fire were 
some scraps of half-burnt writing paper, — the order 
in which people had been called out to take their places 
in the procession. “ I meant tc keep that,” said Betsey 


60 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


Morris, almost angrily. Whether the olfl wul )W had 
been a little dazed and had burnt the will also, no¬ 
body knew, but it was certaiidy gone. She had been 
trying to put the house in order a little ; some of the 
borrowed chairs were already standing outside the 
door, for she was familiar with the contents of the 
house. Poor little drudge ! she had worked to the 
very end. 

It was almost too great an excitement for the towns¬ 
people ; most of them had just heard of the missing 
will for the first time, and the crowd of wagons dis¬ 
appeared slowly. Tliis sudden death was a great 
drawback to the funeral feast, but Betsey managed 
skillfully to muster those guests who were to stay, 
for that was an important part of the rites. Poor old 
widow Towner was comfortably disposed of, and 
wrapped in some coverlids, and carried away on the 
floor of a wagon to the desolate little black house 
where she had lived alone for many years ; and then 
the tables were laid, and the company gravely ate 
and drank their fill. 

Andrew saw his lady-love alone only for a minute 
after the funeral. “ I wish I could stay and heb3 you 
look for it,” said she, “ but father says there’s a storm 
coming and we’d better get home.” It annoyed him 
to find that her only thought was of the will. To be 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


61 


lure, it was uppermost in his own mind, but he had 
too lately seen his oldest and kindest friend put into 
a frozen grave to be quite forgetful of him, and ho 
would have liked best for Susan to sympathize with 
the better part of his thoughts. It flashed through 
his mind that he had once heard some one say that 
Susan had an eye to the windward, but he held her 
hand the more affectionately for a moment, as he 
helped her into her father’s wagon, and tucked in the 
buffalo skin with care by way of making amends for 
such injustice. There had been times when it had 
seemed to him that Susan could not understand his 
best thoughts, and that she was a little bored if he 
talked about subjects instead of people, and he sighed 
ft little and felt lonely as he went back to the house. 
“ The higher you climb, the fewer you have for com¬ 
pany,” he said to himself; and it struck him as being 
a very fine thought. 

There was a good deal of conversation going on in 
the house, and as he opened the kitchen door, where 
the women were busy clearing away the supper, there 
was a sudden hush. To tell the truth, they had been 
taking sides on the question of Susan’s being willing 
io marry him if the will could not be found. 

“ You need n’t tell me,” said our friend Mrs. Bee- 
dle, as she stood at the closet putting away some 


62 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


plates. “ Susan never’d had him in the world if it 
liad n’t been for the property. I always thought 
she’d a looked another way if the dollars had n’t 
shone in her eyes. I don’t blame her. 1 should n’t 
pick out Andrei* for his self alone. 1 ’d as soon live 
on b’iled rice the year round. I like to see a young 
fellow that’s got some snap to him.” 

“ But there, now he’s got to be his own master he 
may start up,” suggested some one. “ I always 
thought well of Andrer.” 

“ Land, so did I! ” said Mrs. Beedle, with surprise. 
“ I ain’t saying nothing against him. What do you 
guess old lady Towner could a done with the will ? 
It don’t seem like her to have burnt it. But she 
need n’t have burnt the paper o’ names for the pro¬ 
cession ; they ’re usually kept. I know we’ve got 
’em to our house for every funeral that’s been since 
I can remember: gran’ther’s, and graudma’am’s, and 
old Aunt Kitty’s, and all. She had an awful sight o’ 
folks follow her. You know she wa’n’t but half-sis 
ter to grand’ther, and owned half the farm. ’T was 
her right to have a good funeral, and she had it; they 
set out the best there was. Her own mother was a 
Shepley, and she had over thirty own cousins on the 
Shepley side, and they were a dreadful clannish set. 
I know we set the supper table over five times 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


63 


mother always said it was a real pleasant occasion; 
’t was in September, and a beautiful day for a fune¬ 
ral, and all the family gathered together. I don’t 
more ’ii just remember it myself. Aunt Hitty was in 
her ninety-fourth year, and of course her death 
was n’t no calamity, for she had n’t had her mind for 
above two years. I was small, but I can see just how 
she looked. She’d get a word fixed in her mind in 
the morning, and she’d keep it a-going all day ; somo- 
times she’d call grand’ther by name, and I rec’lect 
one day she said divil, divil, divil, till it seemed as if 
we could n’t stand it no longer.” 

“ I do hope I sha’n’t out-live my usefulness,” 
whined a thin little old woman in black. “ I always 
had a dread o’ beitig a burden to others.” 

“ I say,” said Mrs. Beedle stoutly, “that old folks 
has a right to be maintained and done for; it ain’t 
no favor to them. It looks dreadful hard to me, that 
after you’ve toiled all your good years, and laid up 
what you could, and stood in your lot and place as 
long as you had strength, the minute you get feeble 
you ’re begrudged the food you eat and the chair you 
set in. What’s the use of scanting yourself and lay¬ 
ing up a little somethin’, and seeing other folks spend 
it! Some ain’t got no feelin’s for the old, but for 
luy part I like to make ’em feel of consequence.” 


G4 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


“ Poor old Mis’ Towner! ” said a pleasant-faced 
woman. “ It keeps coming over me about her; 
somehow it seems to me as if she had been dreadful 
hesolate, livin’all alone so. She would do it; many’s 
the time we’ve asked her to our house to stop 
through a cold spell or a storm, but she never seemed 
inclined. I thought when I see her coming in to-day 
she’d better be to home ; but she always was a great 
hand to go to funerals when she could, and then bein’ 
a connection, too. Mis’ Ash and Mis’ Thompson 
said they’d hurry home and be to her place by th« 
time they got her there.” 

“ I s’pose likely she had a little something laid 
up ? ’’ asked Betsey Morris. 

“ Enough to bury her, it’s likely. I know of her 
having thirty-eight dollars she got for some wood a 
spell ago. You know she owned a little wood-lot 
over in the Kimball tract. She picked up a little now 
and then sellin’ eggs, but I guess she ain’t earnt any¬ 
thing tailoring this good while, her eyes have been 
failin’ her so.” 

The will had not been mentioned since Andrew 
had come in and seated himself on the settle, which 
had been pushed back from its usual place. It had 
grown dark, and people had said it was no use to 
hunt any longer, and he had not the courage to gd 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


65 


on with the search ; beside, he could only look in the 
game places over again. He could not help feeling 
worried ; he was impatient for the morrow to come. 
It seemed to him that all this suffering and loss was 
felt by himself alone. It was like a tornado that 
had blown through his life, but everybody else ap¬ 
peared to be on the whole enjoying it, and to have a 
great deal to talk about. He thought, as he listened 
to the busy, gossiping women, how cheerless and 
friendless an old age must be when there was no 
money in a man’s pocket, and for the first time in his 
life he felt poor, and fearful of the future, which had 
always seemed secure until then. He remembered 
how often his uncle had said, “‘It’s a cold world 
when you’ve nothing to give it;” and somehow 
there was a great difference in his own mind between 
his sitting there, uncei’tain and almost unnoticed, and 
his receiving the people eai-lier in the afternoon, as 
the chief mourner and his uncle’s heir. He was the 
master of the house for the time being ; to be sure, 
the will was missing then, bul nowit had disappeared 
almost before his face and eyes. This sudden change 
in his fortune seemed very strange and sad to him, 
and he wished Susan had not gone home. Their love 
for each other was left, at any rate, and he was rich 
again in the thought that she was his; and then a 


66 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


dreadful doubt came, — what if she had an eye to the 
windward ? But he crushed this serpent of a thought 
instantly. 

Later Mr. Dunning came in ; he had gone home 
with some old acquaintances who lived not far away, 
and had spent part of the evening. The snow had 
already begun to sift down as if there were a long 
storm coming; the people had all gone away, and 
Andrew and Betsey Morris and their guest were left 
to themselves. 

“ Now tell me what this trouble is about the will,” 
said Mr. Dunning; and Andrew went over the story 
briefly. 

“ It looks dark for you,” said Mr. Dunning, “ but 
it does n’t seem as if anybody in their senses would 
burn such a thing without knowing what it was; 
however, sh-e may not have been in her senses. It is 
a pity you did not take it yourself befoi'e you left the 
house.” Betsey thought so too, and could have men¬ 
tioned that everybody said it was just like him. “ It 
seems to me that she might have put it back in the 
Bible again, thinking it was a family record, or some¬ 
thing of that kind.” 

“ I thought of that, and I looked there, but I could 
not find it,” said Andrew ; but he went into the best 
room and brought out the Bible, and looked througlf 
h carefully, leaf by leaf. 


ANDREW^S FORTUNE, 


67 


Who is the heir at law ? ” asked INIr. Dunning; 
and lie was told that it was a cousin of Mr. Den 
nett’s, old Lysander Dennett, who lived seventeen or 
eighteen miles away. It would have been a great 
sorrow to the old gentleman if he had thought of his 
property going in that direction. 

“ He would have given what he had to the State 
sooner than have such a thing happen ! ” said Betsey, 
excitedly. “ I believe he’d turn over in his grave. 
You know he was a very set man, but he did have 
excellent judgment.” 

“ I wish I had come a little sooner; I should like 
to have seen Steplien again,” said Mr. Dunning; and 
they were all silent for a time. 

“ Why don’t you put your uncle’s death in the 
Bible, now you’ve got it right here, Andrer ? ” 
asked Betsey, and she brouglit the little stone bottle 
of ink, and Andrew carefully wrote the name and 
date. “ He was the last of them,” said Betsey 
mournfully, “ and they was always respectable folks. 
I suppose you remember the old people well as I do, 
Mr. Dunning?” — 

Mr. Dunning was not used to feeling sleepy at 
half-past nine, though that hour was unusually late 
for his entertainers, and finding that he seemed dis¬ 
posed to linger, Andrew put more wood on the fire, 


G8 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


and drew some cider, and brought some apples from 
the cellar, and the guest seemed very comfortable. 
It was like old times, he said. He asked Andrew a 
great many questions about the old dwellers in the 
town, — what had become of the boys and girls he 
used to know ; and at last he asked the young man 
some questions about himself, and suddenly said, 
with a directness that was startling, “ In case of the 
will’s not turning up, what do you mean to do ? ” 

“ I have hardly had time to think,” said Andrew, 
flushing ; and then, being sure of sympathy, he 
opened his heart to the gray-headed man, who seemed 
to him to be finishing his life while he was just be¬ 
ginning. “ I believe I have n’t a very good reputa¬ 
tion, Mr. Dunning, but I feel sure I could make 
something of myself if I had the chance. I never 
have had anything to do that I liked to do. I never 
took to farming ; my uncle never wanted to give up 
the reins, and I did n’t want him to. He could n’t 
bear the thought of my going away and leaving him, 
and you know there is n’t much business in a farm¬ 
ing town like this for a young man. I don’t know 
which way to turn,” said poor Andrew, a sense of 
the misery of the situation coining over him as it 
never had before. “ I don’t want to blame the best 
friend I ever had, but I wish now be had put me to 
»ome business or other.” 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


69 


Yes, yes,” answered Mr. Dunning absently. 

It would have made it easier for you, perhaps ; but 
if you did n’t start of your own accord, he probably 
did n’t want to push you; he was glad to have you 
liere. My boys are all scattered ; ” and then he said 
no rno^-e for a while. Andrew felt half rebuked, and 
half convinced that it had been right to stay at 
home. He suspected that his guest was thinking 
of his own affairs, and wished he had not told so 
long a story. 

All night long Andrew turned and tossed in his 
bed, and thought about his troubles, until his head 
ached, and it was a relief when it was time to get up 
in the early dark morning and go out to feed the 
cattle. As soon as it was light and breakfast was 
over, they all hunted again for the will, high and 
low, up-stairs and down, but it was no use ; and later 
they went decorously to meeting. The neiglibors 
came in, and Mr. Dunning was the hero of the hour, 
and was treated with great ceremony and honor. He 
was a well-known man, and his coming was taken as 
a great favor. Mr. Dennett’s fame had been only 
provincial, and Andrew’s perplexities would wait to 
be considered later. It was a very exciting time, 
and the people me" together in the farm-house kitch¬ 
ens and had a great deal to say to one another. One 


70 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


flay had been much like another for a great while 
before that week, and life had been like reading one 
page of a book over and over again. 

Early Monday morning Mr. Dunning went away. 
Andrew drove him over to the village to take the 
stage. He used to dream in his boyhood that he 
would come back some day a rich man ; the dream 
nad come true; but there was after all a dreary pa¬ 
thos in it. Everybody had made a king of him, and 
had seemed proud if he remembered them, and yet, 
— he did not care as he used to think he should. He 
said he meant to come back in the summer, and he 
told Andrew that he hoped to find him master of the 
place; and Andrew made a desperate effort to smile. 
“ If I can do anything for you, you must let me 
know, my boy,” said he. “ I thought a great deal 
of your uncle; he did me some good turns when we 
w^ere young together.” 

“ I have often heard him say that he wished he 
could see you again,” said the young man. “ He 
would have been so pleased to have this visit. He 
used to speak of your sitting together always at 
school, and he used to be so proud when he read 
your name in the papers.” 

jMr. Dunning coughed a little and looked away 
and asked the name of one of the hills which he had 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


71 


forgotten. “ Yes, I wish I coiiid have seen liiin once 
more,” he said after a few minutes ; and then he 
was forced to think of his own schemes and plans, 
for he was on his way back to his every-day \^orld 
again. 

It was only two or three days before Betsey JMor- 
ris heard the sound of bells, and looked out of the 
window to see Mr. Lysaiider Dennett coming in from 
the road, driving a lame white horse in an old high 
backed sleigh. Andrew had gone to see Susan 
Mathes, so she was all alone. She told herself that 
Mr. Dennett might have waited a full week before 
he came spying round, and she would not go to the 
door to welcome him; so he was a long time putting 
his horse under a shed and covering him with the 
buffalo robe, which was worn until it looked fit for 
only a blacksmith’s apron. He stamped the snow ofl 
his boots and flapped his arms to get the stiffness out 
for PI was very cold ; the sky looked as if there wer« 
another storm coming. He dallied as long as possi¬ 
ble, hoping that somebody would come out; but at 
last he summoned courage, and crossed the yaid to 
the house and knocked at the door. Betsey had been 
slyly watching him through the window with a grim 
chuckle, but she kept him waiting a few minutes 
longer, and then met him with affected surprise. 


72 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


She was apparently hospitable, but she placed a chair 
for him almost into the fire itself, and entreated him 
to lay off his coat and stop, it w^as so long since he 
had been over, — a cruel thrust at him for not hav¬ 
ing been at the funeral. “ He never did come ’less 
it was after money, mean-spirited old toad ! ” thought 
she. 

Cousin Lysander was slow of speech ; he unwound 
a long, dingy, yarn comforter from his throat, and 
then he bent forward and rubbed his hands together 
before the fire. He had a curious, narrow face, with 
a nose like a beak, and thin straggling hair and whis¬ 
kers, with two great ears that stood out as if they 
were a schooner’s sails wdng-and-wing. Betsey drew 
her chair to the other side of the fire-place, and be¬ 
gan to knit angrily. 

“We was dreadful concerned to hear o’cousin 
Stephen’s death,” said the poor man. “ He went 
very sudden, did n’t he ? Gre’t loss he is.” 

“ Yes,” said Betsey, “ he was very much looked up 
to ; ” and it was some time before the heir plucked 
up courage to speak again. 

“ Wife and me was lotting on getting over to the 
funeral; but it’s a gre’t ways for her to ride, and it 
was a perishiii’ day that day. She’s be’n troubled 
more than common with her phthisic since cold 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


70 


weather come. I was all crippled up with the rheu 
matism; we wa’n’t neither of us fit to be out ” (plain- 
tively). “ ’T was all I could do to get out to the barn 
to feed the stock whiio Jonas and Tim was gone. 
My boys was over, I s’pose ye know? I don’ 
know’s they come to speak with ye; they ’re back¬ 
ward with strangers, but they ’re good stiddy fel¬ 
lows.” 

“ Them was the louts that was hanging round the 
barn, I guess,” said Betsey to herself. 

“ They ’re the main-stay now; they ’re ahead of 
poor me a’ready. Jonas, he’s got risin’ a hundred 
dollars laid up, and I believe Tim’s got something 
too, — he’s younger, ye know ? ” 

But Betsey gave her chair an angry hitch at this 
mixture of humility and brag, and then was a little 
ashamed of herself, for the memory of old ^Ir. Den¬ 
nett’s kindness and patience rebuked her. “ 1 ’ve al¬ 
ways heard they was good boys,” she said. “ Mr. 
Dennett was speakin’ of ’em only last week ; he 
thou‘dit Jonas must be about out of his time.” 

“ Next June,” said Lysander, taking heart. 

(“I come just as near saying that he spoke of 
leavin’ them something,” said Betsey afterward, “ but 
I did n’t. I thought he might as well tell right out 
what he come for.”) 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


f4 

“ Andrer’s away, I take it ? ” 

And Betsey answered yes, but that he would be 
back early. “ He went otF before dinner ; he’s got 
to be home to see some folks that’s coming. You’d 
better stop, now you ’re over,” she said, and her tone 
was milder. She was a tender-hearted soul, and she 
had made him uncomfortable until she was misera¬ 
ble herself. 

“ I tell you I dread to see Andrer,” said the old 
man sincerely, in almost a whisper. “ I thought I 
might as well come and have it over with, but I tell 
you when I got into the yard I wished I was home 
again. Sometimes I don’t feel as if I had a mite o’ 
right to what Stephen meant to give to somebody 
else ; but Andrer ain’t got his proofs, and my bovs 
has had a hard chance. Somehow or ’nother, it’s 
always been up-hill work to our place, and I feel’s if 
the law gives it to me, it’s the will o’ Providence, and 
I ain’t got no right to set my will ag’inst it. But I 
want to make things pleasant with Andrer; I thought 
if I come right over, and we talked it over pleasant 
together, we could fix it someway for the best. I 
mean well, Betsey, I tell ye honest I do ; and if we 
find out what Stephen calc’lated to do for you, you 
shall have every cent, if it has to come out o’ ray 
part.” 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


75 


I ain’t thought no great about that,” said Betsey, 
W^ho was already considering what there was in the 
house to make a hearty supper for him, he looked so 
starved and timid, like an old white rabbit. “ But I 
rlo feel for Andrer, — you know how he has been 
brought up. There he is now, I declare, and he’s 
fetched Susan with him,” and she bustled out to 
greet them, leaving the visitor more unhappy and at 
a loss than ever. He had thought that everything 
was getting on comfortably, and he meant to lay his 
case before Betsey Morris, and then steal away lest 
he might encounter Andrew, and the idea of meeting 
Susan was particularly unpleasant. But he reflected 
that it would all have to be gone through with some 
time or other, and he sat up as straight as he could 
in his chair, prepared to hold his own. 

Betsey shut the kitchen door after her, and went 
out a few steps to speak to them before they drove 
on into the shed. “ Lysander’s come,” — and for the 
life of her she could not help a smile. “ I was mad 
at first, but when I come to see how meachin’ he was 
I turned to and pitied him, just as your uncle used 
tc. He’d scold dreadfully when he see him a-com- 
ing, but hfi always loaded up hiS old wagon for him 
when he went home. I guess you can have things 
pretty much as you want em.” 


76 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


Andrew frowned. He had to go through the same 
process of mind as Betsey, but he achieved it in 
about the same .ength of time ; and though he was 
very angry at first, after he had put up his own horse 
he gave tlie lame white beast a big measure of corn 
and a pitchforkful of hay, and put her in the warmest 
stall. He still felt as if he would like to ill-treat her 
master as he went into the house. Old Lysander 
looked more meaching than ever, as Betsey had ex¬ 
pressed herself, and Susan sat near the fire, looking 
cross and cold. She was a pretty girl, but not a very 
good-tempered one, an.d it had been a serious an¬ 
noyance to her to find that there was some danger of 
her having to come down from the high perch she 
had taken as mistress in prospect of the Dennett 
farm. Andrew had been laughed at for his old- 
fashioned, sober ways, and for his mind’s habit of 
wool-gathering. Some blunders he had made were 
kept alive as great jokes, and he had suffered from 
contrast with a smart young fellow who had come 
from the nearest large town, and was clerk at the 
country store and post-office. He had a “ way ” with 
him, and Andrew had not, and Susan’s heart had 
been pulled in both directions. * 

Andrew shook hands cordially with the old man; 
he looked a little like Mr. Dennett, and it seemed a? 



ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


77 


if some thin and weather-beaten likeness of him were 
Bitting there, forlorn, before his own fire, or as if he 
had come back unsuccessful from his adventure into 
the next world. “ You ’ll stop all night, of course,” 
paid the young man. “ It’s rough traveling, and it’s 
getting dark now. You won’t think of going home. 
I put up your horse. I suppose you want to liave a 
little talk about business, too.” It was hard work to 
say this, and Susan’s eyes snapped and grew very 
black. “I wonder he don’t ask him right off if he 
can’t stop here himself,” she muttered, and Betsey 
thought he was too free-spoken altogether. Lysander 
was evidently touched by this great civility. He had 
expected to be treated dreadfully, and to tell the 
truth, though his wife had started him off early in the 
morning, he had lingered all day at one place and 
another along the road. 

It grew dark very soon, and Andrew went out to 
bring in the wood for the night and to do his usual 
work; and after a while he came in, looking pleas¬ 
anter than before, which made Susan crosser. She 
was an honest and just girl according to her lights, 
and she would not have wished her lover to keep 
what was not his, but it was her way to make every¬ 
body feel that it was injustice, and that Andrew was 
making somebody else an out-and-out present for hia 


78 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


conscience’ sake. She was treating poor Lysander’a 
attempts at conversation with lofty disdain, and he 
grew more and more humble, and consequently disa¬ 
greeable. He felt that he was creeping into this 
good luck by a very crooked way, and it did not be¬ 
hoove him to put on airs and march in upon his pos¬ 
sessions with his banners flying ; and though he said 
to himself over and over that the law makes the best 
will after all; that he was certainly Stephen’s next 
of kin and always had had a hard time, and that An¬ 
drew had been given many favors by somebody who 
was no blood relation, yet he was very sorry for the 
young fellow, and showed his sympathy as well as he 
knew how. 

“ 1 come over a purpose to say to ye that I mean 
to do what’s right about this,” he said at last, at the 
end of a long and awkward pause. “ I’ve asked ad¬ 
vice, and I find the property comes to me by the law. 
But I know Stephen had it in his mind to give you 
the best part of what he had, and I want to do 
what’s fair and right, and so does my woman and 
the boys. We ’ll leave it out to anybody you name, 
or you may have your say, or we ’ll share even. I 
don’t want to have no trouble. The first thins: J 
says when I got wind of it was I never’d touch a 
cent by claim; but when I come to think it over, it ’| 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


79 


come bv law, and our folks have n’t laid up nothin’ to 
Bpeak of; it’s been so we could n’t. My sons are 
Bmart, stiddy fellows, and I’d like to let the young¬ 
est one have some schooling; he always took to his 
book. I don’t want to be a drag on ’em, when it gets 
so I can’t work. I want ye to thirik well about it 
and let me know. I won’t hurry ye, and we ’I: 
make out the papers all square whenever you say.” 

“Whining old thing!” said Susan to lierself; and 
Betsey left her chair and hurried to the closet, im¬ 
patiently, for nothing whatever, and gave the door a 
little slam when she shut it again. 

Andrew moved a little in his chair. “ No, Mr. 
Dennett,” said he, bravely. “ I could n’t touch a cent 
unless the will was found. If I had ever seen it, and 
knew for certain what was in it, perhaps I should act 
different; but as it is I should feel as if I was living 
on you, and I should n’t like that. The law gives 
you the property, as you say, and I hope you and 
your folks will be comfortable here. I want to speak 
about one thing: my uncle told me he had left Bet- 
s<‘y five hundred dollars; he spoke to me about it 
sevei al times, and I promised I w'ould see to it when 
anything happened to him. He said he wanted to 
feel she w’ould be comfortable when she got to be 
old. I’m much obliged to you for what you say, 
und for coming right over and talking fair and kind,” 


80 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


Betsey told herself then that he talked like a fool, 
but she always insisted afterwards that he did speak 
up like a man. ’ Susan thought her lover was better 
looking than he used to be ; she really admired him 
at that moment, but her heart sank within her. “ He 
is dreadful high-flown,” she said to herself, with an 
uneasy sense of what might be required of her as to 
noble ideas in years to come, if he went on in this 
way. It was hard, when she had been thinking they 
would be the two richest young people in town, to 
find that Andrew had decided to make them almost 
the poorest. She wished him to go to law ; she 
thought she was fond of him, but people had always 
known he had no turn for business, and she had 
trusted to her own wits to make the farm pay well. 
Andrew had talked to her in a way that touched her 
heart only that afternoon, as they drove over, and 
had told her that he meant to be somebody for her 
sake, and make her proud of him yet; and she had 
smiled and kissed him with great affection, but it had 
been almost too cold for love-making, and she was a 
sadlj' disappointed girl. 

They spent a solemn evening. Old Lysander 
talked a great deal about the weather and the likeli¬ 
hood of there being more snow before morning, and 
then he fell asleep and snored; and later Andrew 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


81 


W’alked over with Susan to her aunt’s, where she 
was going to spend a day or two, as often happened. 
She was dreading to meet her relatives, but Andrew 
was on provokingly good terms with himself. He 
told Susan that she was everything to him, and he 
did n’t care about losing the farm so long as he had 
her; and she said that she was n’t half good enough 
for him, and resolved that she would n’t break his 
heart now, for he was a well-meaning fellow, but 
before spring there would be some way she could get 
out of it. 

The short winter days that followed were dreary 
enough to the hero of this story. His comfortable 
life had always seemed a certainty to him, and now 
new cares and perplexities had fallen heavily upon 
him. He could not help noticing that there was a 
change in the manner of his neighbors, and Betsey 
often mentioned that she could not imagine how her 
sister got on without her, and was evidently in a 
hurry to settle herself in her new home. The Den¬ 
netts had asked them both to stay until spring at the 
farm, when they meant to make a change, and it 
seemed the best thing to do ; but Andrew kept him¬ 
self busier than ever before in his life, lest he might 
»e accused of idling and eating another man’s bread 


82 


COUNTRY BY-WATS. 


He undertook to keep the district school near by, 
and succeeded tolerably well, and it was a great sat¬ 
isfaction to be earning something. He hunted far 
and near for some employment, until he was dis¬ 
couraged. He knew that Susan would despise his 
hiring out on a farm for the summer, and there 
seemed to be nothing else, if there were even that. 
He felt very forlorn, and sometimes there was a 
chill in Susan’s sunshine, which was the saddest thing 
of all. 

One day late in January he made up his mind to 
write to Mr. Dunning and ask him to find some work 
for him in Boston, though it was awful to think of 
going so far away. Susan brightened when he spoke 
of it, and when a letter was received telling him to 
come as soon as possible he said good-by to her and 
went, and some one else finished the town school. 
He often smiled in after-years to think of the misgiv¬ 
ings with which he left his home, and the tremen¬ 
dous distance which seemed to lie between it and the 
city ; it was almost like going off into space. The 
change to city life was a very great one, and at first 
he felt as a small boy might who had fastened hii 
sled behind a railway train. However, he proved 
equal to the place for which Mr. Dunning had rec¬ 
ommended him ; his steady, painstaking ways found 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


83 


favor with his employers, while he lost some :f his 
natural slowness from being with people who were 
always in a hurry. He wrote long and edifying let¬ 
ters to Susan, and i;onfided to her his aims and hopes, 
and his certainty that she would like the city as much 
as he did. She replied from time to time, but she had 
by no means the pen of a ready writer; and when, 
one day, he had been thinking a great deal about 
her, and wondering gratefully why she had fallen 
in love with him, a letter came to say that ohe had 
decided that they must part. Her father and mother 
would not consent to her settling so far away, and 
she hoped they would always be friends; she never 
had been good enough for him, — which was not hon¬ 
est, since she thought herself much too good. It was 
a heavy blow, and Andrew was miserable for some 
time. The loss of the will had involved this loss 
also, and life seemed very dismal. 

But he did not mourn all his days, as at first he 
thouo-ht he should. His business grew very interest¬ 
ing, and he set his heart upon making a fortune, since 
other people had done it without any more hard work 
than he was willing to do; and after a while the 
new'S reached his old neighbors that his employers 
thought highly of him and would soon send him out 
So China, — they being xU the tea business. Then 


84 


COUNTRY BY-WATS. 


even Mrs. Beedle said she always knew there was a 
good deal to Andrew Phillips, and now folks that had 
laughed at him were going to see. And sure enough, 
he did make his way steadily upward, as many a 
country boy has done before and since. He changed 
litt]<3 in reality : he dressed well, and behaved him¬ 
self in the approved fashion, and gained a good 
knowledge of the world, and his manner, which had 
been thought awkward, came to be considered good 
enough. While in his boyhood he had been called 
stupid and slow-moulded, among his business friends 
he passed for a reserved and discreet and cautious 
man. He never was very attractive; his associates 
found no fault with him, for his life was honorable 
and just, but he did not make many personal friends, 
though he was so much respected. You might have 
a strong feeling of attachment for him after you had 
known him long, but that was all ; he was not a per¬ 
son whom one could be enthusiastic about. His was 
not the character which rouses enthusiasm, but after 
his own fashion he made a success of life, and that 
cannot always be said of men who are more popular 
with their fellows and more gifted by nature than he. 

He married, after a while, an orphan niece of one 
of the firm, of which in time he rose to be a partner 
himself, and everybody thought it was a good match 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


85 


for both of them. The fair Susan was never thought 
of with a sigh; it is oftener in love stories than in 
real life that such wounds of the heart take loug to 
heal. The world seems to come to an end, and then 
is begun anew ; after people many, their earlier lov¬ 
ers are seldom thought of with regret, however dear 
they were in their day. Andrew’s wife was a far 
better wife for him than Susan ever would or could 
have been, and he always said so to himself when he 
thought of the matter at all. They had a pleasant 
house and a pleasant position in society, and our hero 
often smiled to think of his misery when he found 
that his uncle’s estates were not to be his, after all. 
It was a good while before it flashed through his 
mind, one day, that it had been a blessing in disguise. 
There had been eight thousand dollars beside the 
farm; there never had been a fortune equal to it in 
that neighborhood ; but his own possessions already 
covered it over and over again, and it made him fairly 
wretched to think how small and narrow his life 
would have been if he had stayed at home on the 
farm, how much he should have missed, and how 
much less he could have done for himself and for 
other people. He said more than once that it had 
been the making of him, and that the hand of God 
had plainly shaped his course. 


86 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


After a good many years he went back to his na¬ 
tive place ; he had been meaning to do it for a long 
time, and he was somehow often reminded of Mr. 
Dunning’s visit. It was a pleasant week in late sum¬ 
mer, and the old town was little changed ; only there 
seemed to be very few old people and a great many 
younger ones. He went to see every one whom he 
knew, and his holidays were after all very pleasant. 
He called upon Susan, and found her old and homely 
and complaining, though she had married the smart 
young man at the store, and had been as fond of him 
as it was her nature to be of any one. It was odd that 
he was awkward and lank and slow-moulded now, 
while Andrew was in her eyes a most distinguished 
and elegant looking man, and she could not imagine 
how she ever had the courage to dismiss him. ‘‘ You 
know I always set a great deal by you, Mr. Phillips,” 
she said, with a look that made her a little like the 
Susan of old. He seemed a part of her triumphant 
youth, and it brought back all her old pride and am¬ 
bition. She had meant to be somebody and had failed, 
and perhaps she never exactly understood where her 
mistake had been until then. It is likely that from 
that time forward she occasionally said that she might 
have been ridingf in her carriage. 

Andrew stayed at the Dennett farm ; nothing had 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE, 


87 


ever told him so plainly how different a man he was 
from what he might have been, or how different a life 
he led, like coming back to the old house. It seemed 
very strange to wake up in the morning in his old 
room, which with unwonted sentiment he had asked 
if he might occupy. Lysander Dennett had not lived 
long to enjoy his good fortune, but it had been a great 
blessing to his sons, who were farmers by nature; 
and now oue lived in the old house, and the other 
in a new one near by, and they worked the farm to¬ 
gether, while they were, by reason of their wealth, 
two of the foremost citizens, and one of them had even 
been sent to tlie legislature. The old place was not 
altered much. Andrew was reminded of his uncle and 
of his own boyhood at every step, and he offered to 
buy one or two old pieces of furniture, which were 
gladly given to him when he was found to be attached 
to them ; and, since they were brass-mounted and 
claw-footed, his wife welcomed them with joy, and 
thought his pilgrimage to his native place had not 
been in vain. There was a son of Jonas Dennett’s at 
the farm who reminded him of himself in his youth, 
and he made friends in a grave way with the boy, 
and said to himself that in a year or two he would 
give him a start in the world. 

It happened the day before ne ended his visit waa 


88 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


a rainy day, and he was shut up in the house, though 
between two showers in the morning he had gone 
over to pay a last call on Mrs. Beedle, who was still 
living, grown shorter and stouter than ever, until her 
little head and broad round shoulders made her look 
like a June bug. She took great pride in Mr. Phil¬ 
lips, who, indeed, had been kind to her in many ways, 
as well as to Betsey Morris, who had died not long 
before. 

After he had come back he was at his wits’ end 
what to do. Jonas Dennett was away and the women 
were busy, and at last he asked if there were not an 
old family Bible somewhere in the house, and was di¬ 
rected to the best room, — stiff and dismal as ever, — 
where it was taken down from the chimney cupboard, 
as the Bible belonging to the Lysander Dennett 
branch was occupying the post of honor on the little 
table in the corner. Andrew caught sight of some 
other ancient-looking volumes, and he mounted the 
chair himself, reaching in at arm’s-length and taking 
out one old brown book after another. There was 
nothing very interesting; they were mostly like Law’s 
Serious Call and the Rise and Progress, and some 
volumes of old sermons by New England divines. 
The last book was a great volume of Townsend’s 
Arrangement of the Old Testament. It was almos 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


89 


as large as the Bible itself, and as he took it out it 
slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. One oi 
the Dennett children, who stood by, stooped to pick 
it up, and as Andrew came down from the chair, dusty 
and disappointed in his search, she gave it to him. 
There was a paper half out between the leaves, which 
the fall had dislodged, and he pulled it out to replace 
it more carefully, thinking of something else all the 
time; but a strange feeling rushed over him at the 
sight of it, and he sat down, still holding the big book 
and the paper, and, to the little girl’s surprise, he grew 
very red in the face. 

It was strange that after so many years he should 
have been the one to find the missing will. It was 
carefully written in his uncle’s stiff, precise hand, and 
the farm and all the money, with the exception of 
Betsey Morris’s legacy, and one to the young Den¬ 
netts, and some smaller ones to the church and the 
old minister, were left to his adopted son. 

And now Andrew was the rightful heir when he 
did not wish to be, and he w^as anything but happy, 
lie remembered the book, and that he looked in it 
himself; it used to be on a table in that same room, 
and poor old Mrs. Towner had carefully replaced the 
paj)er in the Bible, as she thought, for this book was 
not unlike it to her half-blind eyes. Soon after the 


90 


COUNTRY BY-Ways. 


funeral Betsey had put the room severely to rights 
and had stored the books away in the chimney cup¬ 
board, where they had been ever since. He could 
not imagine how he and the other people who had 
searched had overlooked this paper; it must have 
been fastened between two leaves and hidden some¬ 
how. Indeed, it had always been a puzzle to him 
why the will should have been in the Bible at all ; it 
was not like his uncle to put it there; but after all it 
is only people in real life who do uncharacteristic 
things. Andrew went out to the barn and sat there 
alone for a while, listening to the rain on the shingles 
overhead and wondering what he should do. He had 
a great affection for the old place, and he would have 
liked to think it was his, as his uncle wished it to be. 
It cost a good deal of effort to give it up ; but he 
knew that his wife would find it very dull for even a 
little while in the summer, and it was too far from the 
city for him to think of spending much time there. 
It would give him a great deal of trouble, too. And 
Jonas and Tim Dennett would be thrown out of their 
homes ; they were worth five or six thousand dollars 
apiece and their farm now, but they would have to be¬ 
gin life all over again, — they and their wives and 
children. He was a rich man himself and only a little 
nast middle age, and he came to the conclusion tha* 


ANDREW'S FORTUNE. 


91 


he would not claim the property that his uncle had 
given him. 

And when he went into the house he stood for a 
minute in the kitchen warming his hands a little over 
the stove, which to his sorrow had taken the place 
of the old fire-place ; while nobody was looking he 
tucked a folded paper in at the draught, and saw it 
light quickly and burn, and the old wafer spluttered 
a little, while he felt very solemn, and seemed to his 
hostess all day to have something on his mmd. He 
had a feeling of regret about it from time to time, and 
he thought sometimes that it would have been just as 
well to let them know how generous he had been. 
But he always told himself, whenever he thought of 
the will afterward, that it was the best thing for him 
to do. 

So he lost his fortune when he wanted it, and found 
it was his when he would not take it; but he thought 
of the old place more and more as he grew older, and 
Jonas Dennett’s boy came to the city that next spring. 




AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


was a fine afternoon, just warm enough 
K enough, and I started off alone 

on horseback, though I do not know why I 
should say alone when I find my horse such good 
company. She is called Sheila, and she not only 
gratifies one’s sense of beauty, but is very interesting 
in her character, while her usefulness in this world 
is beyond question. I grow more fond of her every 
week; we have had so many capital good times to¬ 
gether, and I am certain that she is as much pleased 
as I when we start out for a run. 

I do not say to every one that I always pronounce 
her name in German fashion because she occasion 
ally shies, but that is the truth. I do not mind he 
shying, or a certain mysterious and apparently un¬ 
provoked jump, with which she sometimes indulges 
herself, and no one else rides her, so I think she does 





AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


93 


no harm, but I do not like the principle of allowing 
her to be wicked, unrebuked and unhindered, and 
some day I shall give my mind to admonishing this 
four-footed Princess of Thule, who seems at present 
to consider herself at the top of royalty in this king¬ 
dom or any other. I believe I should not like her 
i)alf so well if she were tamer and entirely and stu¬ 
pidly reliable; I glory in her good spirits and I think 
she has a right to be proud and willful if she chooses. 
I am proud myself of her quick eye and ear, her sure 
foot, and her slender, handsome chestnut head. I 
look at her points of high breeding with admiration, 
and I thank her heartily for all the’pleasure she has 
given me, and for what I am sure is a steadfast 
friendship between us, — and a mutual understanding 
that rarely knows a disappointment or a mistake. 
She is careful when I come home late through the 
ishadowy, twilighted woods, and I can hardly see my 
way ; she forgets then all her little tricks and capers, 
and is as steady as a clock with her tramp, tramp, 
over the rough, dark country roads. I feel as if I 
liad suddenly grown a pair of wings when she fairly 
flies over the ground and the wind whistles in my 
ears. There never was a time when she could not 
go a little faster, but she is willing to go step by step 
through the close woods, pushing her way through 


94 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


the branches, and stopping considerately when a 
bough that will not bend tries to pull me off the sad¬ 
dle. And she never goes away and leaves me when 
I dismount to get some flowers or a drink of spring 
water, though sometimes she thinks what fun it would 
be. I cannot speak of all her virtues for I have not 
learned them yet. We are still new friends, for I 
have only ridden her two years and I feel all the 
fascination of the first meeting every time I go out 
with her, she is so unexpected in her ways; so amus¬ 
ing, so sensible, so brave, and in every way so de¬ 
lightful a horse. 

It was in October, and it was a fine day to look 
at, though some of the great clouds that sailed 
through the sky were a little too heavy-looking to 
promise good weather on the morrow, and over in 
the west (where the wind was coming from) they 
were packed close together and looked gray and wet. 
It might be cold and cloudy later, but that would not 
hinder my ride; it is a capital way to keep warm, to 
come along a smooth bit of road on the run, and I 
ehould have time at any rate to go the way I wished, 
BO Sheila trotted quickly through the gate and out 
of the village. There was a flicker of color left on 
the oaks and maples, and though it was not Indian- 
summer weather it was first cousin to it. I took off 


OCTOBER RIDE. 


95 


my cap to let the wind blow through my hair; I had 
half a mind to go down to the sea, but it was too 
late for that; there was no moon to light me home. 
Sheila took the strip of smooth turf just at the side 
of the road for her own highway, she tossed her 
head again and again until I had my hand full of her 
thin, silky mane, and she gave quick pulls at her bit 
and hurried little jumps ahead as if she expected me 
already to pull the reins tight and steady her for a 
hard gallop. I patted her and whistled at her, I was 
so glad to see her again and to be out riding, and I 
gave her part of her reward to begin with, because 
I knew she would earn it, and then we were on bet¬ 
ter terms than ever. She has such a pretty way of 
turning her head to take the square lump of sugar, 
and she never bit my fingers or dropped the sugar in 
her life. 

Down in the lower part of the town on the edge 
of York, there is a long tract of woodland, covering 
wdiat is called the Rocky Hills ; rough, high land, 
that stretches along from beyond Agamenticus, near 
the sea, to the upper part of Eliot, near the Piscat- 
ftqua River. Standing on Agamenticus, the w^oods 
seem to cover nearly the whole of the country as far 
ts one can see, and th3re is hardly a clearing to break 
,his long reach of forest of which I speak ; there 


96 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS 


must be twenty miles of it in an almost unbroken 
line. The roads cross it hexe and there, and one can 
sometimes see small and lonely farms hiding away 
in the heart of it. The trees are for the most part 
young growth of oak or pine, though I could slio'w 
you yet many a noble company of great pines that 
once would have been marked with the king’s arrow, 
and many a royal old oak which has been overlooked 
in the search for ships’ knees and plank for the navy 
yard, and piles for the always shaky, up-hill and 
down, pleasant old Portsmouth bridge. The part of 
these woods which I know best lies on either side 
the already old new road to York on the Rocky 
Hills, and here I often ride, or even take perilous 
rough drives through the cart-paths, the wood roads 
which are busy thoroughfares in the winter, and are 
silent and shady, narrowed by green branches and 
carpeted with slender brakes, and seldom traveled 
over, except by me, all summer long. 

It was a great surprise, or a succession of surprises, 
one summer, when I found that every one of the old 
uneven tracks led to or at least led by what had once 
been a clearing, and in old days must have been the 
secluded home of some of the earliest adventurous 
farmers of this region. It must have taken great 
courage, I think, to strike the fir^t blow of one’s ax« 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


97 


here in the woods, and it must have been a brave cer¬ 
tainty of one’s perseverance that looked forward to 
the smooth field which was to succeed the unfruitful 
wilderness. The farms were far enough apart to be 
very lonely, and I suppose at first the cry of fierce 
wild creatures in the forest was an every-day sound, 
and the Indians stole like snakes through the bushea 
mil crept from tree to tree about the houses watch* 
ing, begging, and plundering, over and over again. 
There are some of these farms still occupied, where 
the land seems to have become thoroughly civilized, 
but most of them were deserted long ago; the people 
gave up the fight with such a persistent willfulness and 
wildness of nature and went away to the village, or to 
find more tractable soil and kindlier neighborhoods. 

I do not know why it is these silent, forgotten 
plai-es are so delightful to me; there is one which I 
always call my farm, and it was a long time after I 
knew it well before I could find out to whom it had 
once belonged. In some strange way the place has 
become a pai t of my world and to belong to my 
i,honghls and my life. 

I suppose every one can say, “ I have a little king¬ 
dom where I give laws.” Each of us has truly a king¬ 
dom in thought, and a certain spiritual possession. 
’There are some gardens of mine where somebody 
7 


98 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


plants the seeds and pulls the weeds for me ever^ 
year without my ever taking a bit of trouble. I have 
trees and fields and woods and seas and houses, I own 
a great deal of the world to think and plan and dream 
about. The picture belongs most to the man who 
loves it best and sees entirely its meaning. We can 
always have just as much as we can take of things, 
and we can lay up as much treasure as we please in 
the higher world of thought that can never be spoiled 
or hindered by moth or rust, as lower and meaner 
wealth can be. 

As for this farm of mine, I found it one day when 
I was coming through the woods on horseback trying 
to strike a shorter way out into the main road. I 
was pushing through some thick underbrush, and 
looking ahead I noticed a good deal of clear sky as 
if there were an open place just beyond, and pres¬ 
ently I found myself on the edge of a clearing. There 
was a straggling orcliard of old apple-trees, the grass 
uboLit them was close and short like the wide door- 
3 ai-d of an old farm-house and into this cleared space 
the little pines were growing on every side. The 
old pines stood a little way back watching their chil¬ 
dren march in upon their inheritance, as if they were 
eady to interfere and protect and defend, if any 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


99 


trouble came. I could see that it would not be many 
years, if they were left alone, before the green grass 
would be covered, and the old apple-trees would grow 
mossy and die for lack of room and sunlight in the 
midst of the young woods. It was a perfect acre of 
turf, only here and there I could already see a cush¬ 
ion of juniper, or a tuft of sweet fern or bay berry. 
I walked the horse about slowly, picking a hard little 
yellow apple here and there from the boughs over 
my head, and at last I found a cellar all grown over 
with grass, with not even a bit of a crumbling brick 
to be seen in the hollow of it. No doubt there were 
some underground. It was a very large cellar, twice 
as large as any I had ever found before in any of 
these deserted places, in the woods or out. And that 
told me at once that there had been a large house 
above it, an unusual house for those old days ; the 
family was either a large one, or it had made for itself 
more than a merely sutficient covering and shelter, 
with no inch of unnecessary room. I knew I was on 
very high land, but the trees were so tall and close 
that I could not see beyond them. The wind blew 
over pleasantly and it was a curiously protected and 
hidden place, sheltered and quiet, witn its one small 
crop of cider apples dropping ungathered to the ground, 
and unharvested there, except by hurrying black ants 
ind sticky, witless little snailr 

LofC. 


iUO COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 

I suppose my feeling toward this place was like 
that about a ruin, only this seemed older than a ruin. 
I could not hear my horse’s foot-falls, and an apple 
startled me when it fell with a soft thud, and I 
watched it roll a foot or two and then stop, as if it 
knew it never would have anything more to do in 
the world. I remembered the Enchanted Palace and 
the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, and it seemed as if 
1 were on the way to it, and this was a corner of 
that palace garden. The horse listened and stood 
still, without a bit of restlessness, and when we heard 
the far cry of a bird she looked round at me, as if 
she wished me to notice that we were not alone in 
the world, after all. It was strange, to be sure, that 
people had lived there, and had had a home where 
they were busy, and where the fortunes of life had 
found them ; that they had followed out the law of 
existence in its succession of growth and flourishing 
and failure and decay, within that steadily narrowing 
circle of trees. 

The relationship of untamed nature to what is 
tamed and cultivated is a very curious and subtle 
thing to me ; I do not know if every one feels it so 
intensely. In the darkness of an early autumn even 
hig I sometimes find myself whistling a queer tane 
that chimes in with the crickets’ piping and the criei 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


10 ’ 


of the little creatures around me in tlie garden. 1 
have no thought of the rest of the world. I wonder 
what I am ; there is a strange self-coiisciousness, but 
I am only a part of one great existence which is 
called nature. The life in me is a bit of all life, and 
where I am happiest is where I find that which is 
next of kin to me, in friends, or trees, or hills, or seas, 
or beside a flower, when I turn back more than once 
to look into its face. 

Tlie world goes on year after year. We can use its 
forces, and shape and mould them, and perfect this 
thing or that, but we cannot make new forces; we 
only use the tools we find to carve the wood we find. 
There is nothing new ; we discover and combine and 
use. Here is the wild fruit, — the same fruit at heart 
as that with which the gardener wins his prize. The 
world is the same world. You find a diamond, bu.t 
the diamond was there a thousand years ago ; you did 
not make it by finding it. We grow spiritually, un¬ 
til we grasp some new great truth of God; but it was 
always true, and waited for us until we came. What 
is there new and strange in the world except our¬ 
selves ! Our thoughts are our own ; God gives our 
life to us moment by moment, but He gives it to be 
^ur own. 

‘ Ye on your harps must lean to hear 
A secret chord that mine will bear.” 


102 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


As I looked about me that day I saw the differ¬ 
ence that men liad made slowly fading out of sight. 
It was like a dam in a river ; when it is once swept 
away the river goes on the same as before. The old 
patient, sublime forces were there at work in their 
appointed way, but perhaps by and by, wlien the ap- 
j)le-trees are gone and the cellar is only a rough hol¬ 
low in the woods, some one will again set aside these 
forces that have worked unhindered, and will bring 
this corner of the world into a new use and shape. 
What if we could stop or change forever the work¬ 
ing of these powers! But Nature repossesses herself 
surely of what we boldly claim. The pyramids stand 
yet, it happens, but where are all those cities that 
used also to stand in old Egypt, proud and strong, 
and dating back beyond men’s memories or tradi¬ 
tions, — turned into sand again and dust that is like 
all the rest of the desert, and blows about in the 
wind ? Yet there cannot be such a thing as life that 
is lost. The tree falls and decays, in the dampness of 
the woods, and is part of the earth under foot, but an¬ 
other tree is growing out of it; perhaps it is part of 
its own life that is springing again from the part of 
it that died.- God must always be putting again to 
some use the life that is withdrawn ; it must live 
because it is Life. There can be no confusion tc 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


103 


God in this wonderful world, the new birth of the 
immortal, the new forms of the life that is from ever¬ 
lasting to everlasting, or the new way in which it 
comes. But it is only God who can plan and order 
it all, — who is a father to his children, and cares for 
the least of us. I thought of his unbroken prom¬ 
ises ; the people who lived and died in that lonely 
place knew Him, and the chain of events was fitted 
to their thoughts and lives, for their development 
and education. The world was made for them, and 
God keeps them yet; somewhere in his kingdono 
they are in their places, — they are not lost; whiU 
the trees they left grow older, and the young treei 
spring up, and the fields they cleared are being cov 
ered over and turned into wild laud again. 

I had visited this farm of mine many times sino./ 
that first day, but since the last time I had beeu 
there I had found out, luckily, something about iU 
last tenant. An old lady whom I knew in the vil¬ 
lage had told me that when she was a child she re¬ 
membered another very old woman, who used to live 
here all alone, far from any neighbors, and that one 
afternoon she had come with her mother to see her. 
She remembered the house very well ; it was larger 
and better than most houses in the region. Its owner 


104 (JOUNTRY BY-WAYS. 

was the last of her family; but why she lived alone, 
or what became of her at last, or of her money or 
her goods, or who were her relatives in the town, my 
friend did not know. She was a thrifty, well-to-do old 
sou] j famous weaver and spinner, and she used to 
come to the meeting-house at the Old Fields every 
Sunday, and sit by herself in a square pew. Since I 
knew this, the last owner of my farm has become 
very real to me, and I thought of her that day a great 
deal, and could almost see her as she sat alone on her 
doorstep in the twilight of a summer evening, when 
the thrushes were calling in the woods; or going 
down the hills to church, dressed in quaint fashion, 
with a little sadness in her face as she thought of 
her lost companions and how she did not use to go 
to church alone. And I pictured her funeral to my¬ 
self, and watched her carried away at last by the 
narrow road that wound among the trees ; and there 
was nobody left in the house after the neighbors 
from the nearest farms had put it to rights, and had 
looked over her treasures to their hearts’ content. 
She must have been a fearless woman, and one could 
not stay in such a place as this, year in and year 
out, through the long days of summer and the long 
nights of winter, unless she found herself good com¬ 
pany. 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


105 


I do not think I could find a worse avenue than 
that which leads to my farm, I think sometimes there 
must have been an easier way out which I have yet 
failed to discover, but it has its advantages, for the 
trees are beautiful and stand close together, and I do 
not know such green brakes anywhere as those which 
grow in the shadiest places. I came into a well- 
trodden track after a while, which led into a small 
granite quarry, and then I could go faster, and at last 
I reached a pasture wall which was quickly left be¬ 
hind and I was only a little way from the main road. 
There were a few young cattle scattered about in the 
pasture, and some of them which were lying down 
got up in a hurry and stared at me suspiciously as I 
rode along. It was very uneven ground, and I passed 
some stiff, straiglit mullein stalks which stood apart 
together in a hollow as if they wished to be alone. 
They always remind me of the rigid old Scotch Cov 
enanters, who used to gather themselves together in 
com})anies, against the law, to worship God in some 
secret hollow of the bleak liill-side. Even the small 
est and youngesi of the mulleins was a Covenanter at 
heart; they had all put by their yellow flowers, and 
they will stand there, gray and unbending, through the 
fall rains and winter snows, to keep their places and 
praise God in their own fashion, and they take great 


106 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


credit to themselves for doing it, 1 have no doubt, 
and think it is far better to be a stern and respecta- 
l)le mullein than a straying, idle clematis, that clings 
and wanders, and cannot bear wet weather. I saw 
members of the congregation scattered thi-ongh the 
pasture and felt like telling them to hurry, for the 
long sermon had already begun ! But one ancient 
wortliy, very late on his way to the meeting, hap¬ 
pened to stand in our way, and Sheila bit his dry 
head otf, which was a great pity. 

After I was once on the high road it was not long 
before I found myself in another part of the town 
altogether. It is great fun to ride about the country; 
one rouses a great deal of interest; there seems to 
be somethinsf excitinsr in the si«rht of a "irl on horse- 
back, and people who pass you in wagons turn to 
look after you, though they never would take the 
trouble if you were only walking. The country 
horses shy if you go by them fast, and sometimes 
you stop to apologize. The boys will leave anything 
to come and tlirow a stone at your horse. I think 
Sheila would like to bite a boy, thougli sometimes 
she goes through her best paces when she hears them 
hooting, as if she thought they were admiring her, 
which I never allow myself to doubt. It is consid 
ered a much greater compliment if you make a cal. 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


107 


on horseback than if you came afoot, but carriage 
people are nothing in the country to what they are 
in the city. 

I was on a good road and Sheila was trotting 
steadily, and I did not look at the western sky be¬ 
hind me until I suddenly noticed that tlie air had 
grown colder and the sun had been for a long time 
behind a cloud ; then I found there was going to be 
a shower, in a very little while, too. I was in a 
thinly settled part of the town, and at first I could 
not think of any shelter, until I remembered that not 
very far distant there was an old house, with a long, 
sloping roof, which had formerly been the parsonage 
of the north parish ; there had once been a church 
near by, to which most of the people came who lived 
in this upper part of the town. It had been for 
many years the house of an old minister, of wide¬ 
spread fame in his day ; I had always heard of him 
from the elderly people, and I had often thought I 
should like to go into his house, and had looked at it 
with great interest, but until within a year or two 
there had been people living there. I had even list¬ 
ened with pleasure to a story of its being haunted, 
and this was a capital chance to take a look at the 
old place, so I hurried toward it. 

As I weut in at the broken gate H seemed to me 


108 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS 


Rs if the house might have been shut up and left to 
itself fifty years before, when the minister died, so 
soon the grass grows up after men’s footsteps have 
worn it down, and the traces are lost of the daily 
touch and care of their hands. The home lot was 
evidently part of a pasture, and the sheep had nib¬ 
bled close to the door-step, while tags of their long, 
spring wool, washed clean by summer rains, were 
caught in the rose-bushes near by. 

It had been a very good house in its day, and had 
a dignity of its own, holding its gray head high, as 
if it knew itself to be not merely a farm-house, but 
a Parsonage. The roof looked as if the next win 
ter’s weight of snow might break it in, and the win 
dow panes had been loosened so much in tlieir shak¬ 
ing frames that many of them had fallen out on the 
north side of the house, and were lying on the long 
grass underneath, blurred and thin but still unbroken. 
That was the last letter of the house’s death warrant, 
for now the rain could get in, and the crumbling tim¬ 
bers must loose their hold of each other quickly. I 
had found a dry corner of the old shed for the horse 
and left her there, looking most ruefully over hei 
shoulder after me as I hurried away, for the rain 
had already begun to spatter down in earnest. I 
was not sorry when I found that somebody had 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


109 


Ijroken a pane of glass in the sidelight of the front 
door, near the latch, and I was very pleased when I 
found that by reaching through I could unfasten a 
great bolt and let myself in, as perhaps some tramp 
ill search of shelter had done before me. However, 
1 gave the blackened brass knocker a ceremonious 
rap or two, and I could have told by the sound of it, 
if in no other way, that there was nobody at home. 
I looked up to see a robin’s nest on the cornice 
overhead, and I had to push away the lilacs and a 
withered hop vine which were both trying to cover 
up the door. 

It gives one a strange feeling, I think, to go into 
an empty house so old as this. It was so still there 
that the noise my footsteps made startled me, and 
the floor creaked and cracked as if some one followed 
me about. There was hardly a straw left or a bit of 
string or paper, but the rooms were much worn, the 
bricks in the fire-places were burnt out, rough and 
crumbling, and the doors were all worn smooth and 
round at the edges. The best rooms were wain¬ 
scoted, but up-staii-s there was a long, unfinished room 
with a little square window at each end, under the 
sloping roof, and as I listened there to the rain I 
remembered that I had once heard an old man say 
wistfully, that he had slept in *ust such a “ linter ” 


no 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


chamber as this when he was a boy, and that he 
never could sleep anywhere now so well as he used 
there wdiile the rain fell on the roof just over his 
bed. 

Down-stairs I found a room which I knew must 
have been the study. It was handsomely wainscoted, 
and the finish of it was even better than that of the 
parlor. It must have been a most comfortable place, 
and I fear the old parson was luxurious in his tastes 
and less ascetic, perhaps, than the more puritanical 
members of his congregation approved. There was 
a great fire-place with a broad hearth-stone, where I 
think he may have made a mug of flip sometimes, 
and there were several curious, narrow, little cup¬ 
boards built into the wall at either side, and over the 
fire-place itself two doors opened and there were 
shelves inside, broader at the top as the chimney 
sloped back. I saw some writing on one of these 
doors and went nearer to read it. There was a date 
at the top, some time in 1802, and his reverence 
had had a good quill pen and ink which bravely 
stood the test of time; he must have been a tall man 
.0 have written so high. I thought it might be some 
record of a great storm or other notable event in his 
house or parish, but I w^as amused to find that he 
had written there on the unpainted wood some valu 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


Ill 


able recipes for the medical treatment of horses. 
“ It is Useful for a Sprain —and For a Cough, Take 
of Elecampane ” — and so on. I hope he was not a 
hunting parson, but one could hardly expect to find 
any reference to the early fathers or federal head- 
ship in Adam on the cupboard door. I thought of 
the stories I had heard of the old minister and felt 
very well acquainted with him, though his books had 
been taken down and his fire was out, and he himself 
liad gone away. I was glad to think what a good, 
faithful man he was, who spoke comfortable words 
to his people and lived pleasantly with them in this 
quiet country place so many years. There are old 
people living who have told me that nobody preaches 
nowadays as he used to preach, and that he used to 
lift his hat to everybody ; that he liked a good din¬ 
ner, and always was kind to the poor. 

I thought as I stood in the study, how many times 
he must have looked out of the small-paiied western 
windows across the fields, and how in his later days 
he must have had a treasure of memories of the peq- 
de who had gone out of that room the better for his 
advice and consolation, the people whom he had 
kelped and taught and ruled. I could not imagine 
that he ever angi ily took his parishioners to task for 
their errors of doctrine ; indeed, it was not of his ac- 


112 


CO UNTR Y B Y- TF. I YB. 


tive youth and middle age that I thought at all, but 
of the last of his life, when he sat here in the sun¬ 
shine of a winter afternoon, and the fire flickered and 
snapped on the hearth, and he sat before it in his 
arm-chair with a brown old book which he laid on 
his knee while he thought and dozed, and roused 
himself presently to greet somebody who came in, a 
little awed at first, to talk with him. It was a great 
thing to be a country minister in those old days, and 
to be such a minister as he was ; truly the priest and 
ruler of his people. The times have changed, and 
the temporal power certainly is taken away. The 
divine right of ministers is almost as little believed 
in as that of kings, by many people ; it is not possi¬ 
ble for the influence to be so great, the office and the 
man are both looked at with less reverence. It is a 
pity that it should be so, but the conservative people 
who like old-fashioned ways cannot tell where to 
place all the blame. And it is very odd to think 
that these iconoclastic and unpleasant new times of 
ours will, a little later, be called old times, and that 
the children, when tliey are elderly people, will sigh 
lo have them back again. 

I was very glad to see the old house, and I told 
myself a great many stoiies there, as one cauno* 
help doing in such a place. There must have been 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


11.3 


BO mrtu, filings happen in so many long lives which 
were lived there; people have come into the world 
and gone out of it again from those srpiare rooms 
with their little windows, and I believe if there are 
ghosts who walk about in daylight I was only half 
deaf to their voices, and heard much of what they 
tried to tell me that day. The rooms which had 
looked empty at first were filled again with the old 
clergymen, who met together with important looks 
and complacent dignity, and eager talk about some 
minor point in theology that is yet unsettled ; the 
awkward, smiling couples, who came to be married; 
the mistress of the house, who must have been a 
stately person in her day; the little children who, 
under all their shyness, remembered the sugar-plums 
in the old parson’s pockets, — all these, and even 
the tall cane that must have stood in the entry, were 
visible to my mind’s eye. And I even heard a ser¬ 
mon from the old preacher who died so long ago, on 
the beauty of a life well spent. 

The rain fell steadily and there was no prospect 
of its stop[)ing, though 1 could see that the clouds 
were thinner and that it was only a shower. In the 
Uitchen I found an old chair which I pulled into the 
study, which seemed more cheerful than the rest of 
the house, and then T remembered that there were 
8 


114 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


Bome bits of board in the kitchen also, and the 
thought struck me tliat it would be good fun to make 
a fire in the old fire-place. Everything seemed right 
about the chimney. I even went up into the garret 
to look at it there, for I had no wish to set the par¬ 
sonage on fire, and I brought down a pile of old corn 
husks for kindlings which I found on the garret floor. 
1 built my fire carefully, with two bricks for andirons, 
and when I lit it it blazed up gayly, I poked it and 
it crackled, and though I was very well contented 
there alone I wished for some friend to keep me 
company, it was selfish to have so much pleasure 
with no one to share it. The rain came faster than 
ever against the windows, and the room would have 
been dark if it had not been for my fire, which threw 
out a magnificent yellow light over the old brown 
wood-work. I leaned back and watched the dry 
sticks fall apart in red coals and thought I might 
have to spend the night there, for if it were a storm 
and not a shower I was several miles from home, 
and a late October rain is not like a warm one in 
June to fall upon one’s shoulders. I could hear the 
house leaking when it rained less heu,vily, and the 
soot dropped down the chimney and great drops oi 
water came down, too, and spluttered in the fire. 1 
thought what a merry thing it would be if a party oi 


AN OCTOBER RIDE. 


115 


young people ever had to take refuge there, and I 
could almost see their faces and hear them laugh, 
though until that minute they had been strangers to 
me. 

But the shower was over at last, and my fire was 
out, and the last pale shining of the sun came into 
the windows, and I looked out to see the distant fields 
and woods all clear again in the late afternoon light. 
I must hurry to get home before dark, so I raked up 
the ashes and left my chair beside the fire-place, and 
shut and fastened the front door after me, and went 
out to see what had become of my horse, shaking the 
dust and cobwebs off my dress as I ci’ossed the wet 
grass to the shed. The rain had come thi-ough the 
broken I’oof and poor Sheila looked anxious and hun¬ 
gry as if she thought I might have meant to leave her 
there till morning in that dismal place. I offered her 
my apologies, but she made even a shorter turn than 
usual when I had mounted, and we scurried off down 
the road, spattering ourselves as we went. 1 hope 
the ghosts wiio live in the parsonage watched me 
with friendly eyes, and I looked back myself, to see 
a thin blue whiff of smoke still coming up from the 
great chimney. I wondered who it was that had 
made the first fire there, — but I think I shall have 
made the last. 



FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


ATELY I have been thinking, with much 
sorrow, of the approaching extinction of 
front yards, and of the type of New England 
village character and civilization with which they are 
associated. Formerly, because I lived in an old- 
fashioned New England village, it would have been 
hard for me to imagine that there were parts of the 
country where the Front yard, as I knew it, was not 
in fashion, and that Grounds (however small) had 
taken its place. No matter how large a piece of 
land lay in front of a house in old times, it was still 
a front yard, in spite of noble dimension and the 
skill of practiced gardeners. 

There are still a good many examples of the ol<? 
manner of out-of-door life and customs, as well as a 
good deal of the old-fashioned provincial society, left 
in the eastern parts of the New England States; but 










FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


117 


put side by side with the society that is American 
rather than provincial, one discovers it to be in a 
small minority. The representative United States 
citizen will be, or already is, a Westerner, and li*s 
instincts and ways of looking at things have certain 
characteristics of their own which are steadily grow¬ 
ing more noticeable. 

For many years New England was simply a bit of 
Old England transplanted. We all can remember 
elderly people whose ideas were wholly under the 
influence of their English ancestry. It is hardly 
more than a hundred years since we were English 
colonies, and not independent United States, and 
the customs and ideas of the mother country were 
followed from force of habit. Now one begins to see 
a difference; the old traditions have had time to al¬ 
most die out even in the most conservative and least 
changed towns, and a new element has come in. 
The true characteristics of American society, as I 
have said, are showing themselves more and more 
distinctly to the westward of New England, and 
come back to it in a tide that steadily sweeps away 
the old traditions. It rises over the heads of the 
prim and stately idols before which our grandfathers 
and grandmothers bowed down and worshiped, and 
which we ourselves were at least taught to walk 
softly by as they toppled on their thrones. 


118 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


One cannot help wondering what a lady of the 
old school will be like a hundred years from now ! 
But at any rate she will not be in heart and thought 
and fashion of good breeding as truly an English¬ 
woman as if she had never stepped out of Great 
Britain. If one of our own elderly ladies were sud¬ 
denly dropped into the midst of provincial English 
society, she would be quite at home; but west of her 
own Hudson River she is lucky if she does not find 
herself behind the times, and almost a stranger and 
a foreigner. 

And yet from the first there was a little difference, 
and the colonies were New England and not Old. 
In some ways more radical, yet in some ways more 
conservative, than the people across the water, they 
showed a new sort of flower when they came into 
bloom in this new climate and soil. In the old 
days there had not been time for the family ties to be 
broken and forgotten. Instead of the unknown Eng¬ 
lish men and women who are our sixth and sev¬ 
enth cousins now, they had first and second cousins 
then ; but there was little communication between 
one country and the other, and the mutual interest in 
every-day affairs had to fade out quickly. A traveler 
was a curiosity, and here, even between the villages 
themselves, there was far less intercourse than we 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


119 


^an believe possible. People stayed on their own 
ground; their horizons were of small circumference, 
and their whole interest and thought were spent upon 
their own land, their own neighbors, their own affairs, 
while they not only were contented with this state 
of things but encouraged it. One has only to look 
at the high-walled pews of the old churches, at the 
high fences of the town gardens, and at even the 
strong fortifications around some family lots in the 
burying-grounds, to be sure of this. The inter¬ 
viewer was not besought and encouraged in those 
days, — he was defied. In that quarter, at least, they 
had the advantage of us. Their interest was as real 
and heartfelt in each other’s affairs as ours, let us 
hope ; but they never allowed idle curiosity to show 
itself in the world’s market-place, shameless and un¬ 
blushing. 

There is so much to be said in favor of our own day, 
and the men and women of our own time, that a plea 
for a recognition of the quaintiiess and pleasantness 
of village life in the old days cannot seem unwelcome, 
or without deference to all that has come with the 
later years of ease and comfort, or of discovery in 
the realms of mind or matter. We are beginning 
to cling to the elderly people who are so different 
from ourselves, and for this reason: we are paying 


120 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


them instinctively the honor that is due from us to 
our elders and betters; they have that grand pres¬ 
tige and dignity that only comes with age; they are 
like old wines, perhaps no better than many others 
when they were young, but now after many years 
they have come to be worth nobody knows how many 
dollars a dozen, and the connoisseurs make treasures 
of the few bottles of that vintage which are left. 

It was a restricted and narrowly limited life in the 
old days. Religion, or rather sectarianism, was apt 
to be simply a matter of inheritance, and there was 
far more bigotry in every cause and question, — a 
fiercer partisanship; and because there were fewer 
channels of activity, and those undivided into spe¬ 
cialties, there was a whole-souled concentration of 
energy that was as efficient as it was sometimes nar¬ 
row and short-sighted. People were more contented 
in the sphere of life to which it had pleased God to 
call them, and they do not seem to have been so often 
sorely tempted by the devil with a sight of the king¬ 
doms of the world and the glory of them. We are 
more likely to busy ourselves with finding things to 
do than in doing with our might the work that is in 
our hands already. The disappearance of many of 
die village front yards may come to be typical of the 
altered position of woman, and mark a stronghold oo 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 121 

her way from the much talked-of slavery and subjec¬ 
tion to a coveted equality. She used to be shut off 
from the wide acres of the farm, and had no voice in 
the world’s politics ; she must stay in the house, or 
only hold sway out of doors in this prim corner of 
land where she was queen. No wonder that women 
clung to their rights in their flower-gardens then, and 
no wonder that they have grown a little careless of 
them now, and that lawn mowers find so ready a 
sale. The whole world is their front yard nowa¬ 
days ! 

There might be written a history of front yards in 
New England which would be very interesting to 
read. It would end in a treatise upon landscape 
gardening and its possibilities, and wild flights of 
imagination about the culture of plants under glass, 
the application of artificial heat in forcing, and the 
curious mingling and development of plant life, but it 
would begin in the simple time of the early colonists. 
Tt must have been hard when, after being familiar 
with the gardens and parks of England and Holland, 
they found themselves restricted to front yards by 
way of pleasure grounds. Perhaps they thought such 
^hings were wrong, and that having a pleasant place 

walk about in out of doors would encourage idle 


122 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


and lawless ways in the young; at any rate, for sev 
eral years it was more necessary to raise corn and 
potatoes to keep themselves from starving than to 
lay out alleys and plant flowers and box borders 
among the rocks and stumps. There is a great pa¬ 
thos in the fact that in so stern and hard a life there 
was time or place for any gardens at all. I can pict¬ 
ure to myself the little slips and cuttings that had 
been brought over in the ship, and more carefully 
guarded than any of the household goods ; I can see 
the women look at them tearfully when they came 
into bloom, because nothing else could be a better 
reminder of their old home. What fears there must 
have been lest the first winter’s cold might kill them, 
and with what love and care they must have been 
tended ! I know a rose-bush, and a little while ago 
I knew an apple-tree, that were brought over by the 
first settlers ; the rose still blooms, and until it was 
cut down the old tree bore apples. It is strange tc 
think that civilized New England is no older than the 
little red roses that bloom in June on that slope above 
the river in Kittery. Those earliest gardens were 
very pathetic in the contrast of their extent and their 
power of suggestion and association. Every seed 
that came up was thanked for its kindness, and every 
flower that bloomed was the child of a beloved an 
testry. 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


123 


It would be interesting to watch the growth of the 
gardens as life became easier and more comfortable 
in the colonies. As the settlements fjrew into villages 
and towns, and the Indians were less dreadful, and 
the houses were better and more home-like, the busy 
people began to find a little time now and then when 
they could enjoy themselves soberly. Beside the 
fruits of the earth they could have some flowers and 
a sprig of sage and southernwood and tansy, or lav¬ 
ender that had come from Surrey and could be dried 
to be put among the linen as it used to be strewn 
through the chests and cupboards in the old country. 

I like to think of the changes as they came slowly ; 
that after a while tender plants could be kept through 
the winter, because the houses were better built and 
warmer, and were no longer rough shelters which 
were only meant to serve until there could be some¬ 
thing better. Perhaps the parlor, or best room, and 
.% special separate garden for the flowers were two 
luxuries of the same date, and they made a notice¬ 
able change in the manner of living, — the best room 
being a formal recognition of the claims of society, 
and the front yard an appeal for the existence of 
something that gave pleasure, — beside the merely 
useful and wholly necessary things of life. When it 
was thought worth while to put a fence around the 


124 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


flower-garden the respectability of art itself was es¬ 
tablished and made secure. Whether the house was 
a fine one, and its inclosure spacious, or whether it 
was a small house with only a narrow bit of ground 
in front, this yard was kept with care, and it was dif¬ 
ferent from the rest of the land altogether. The 
children were not often allowed to play there, and 
the family did not use the front door except upon oc¬ 
casions of more or less ceremony. I think that many 
of the old front yards could tell stories of the lovers 
who found it hard to part under the stars, and lin¬ 
gered over the gate ; and who does not remember 
the solemn group of men who gather there at funer¬ 
als, and stand with their heads uncovered as the 
mourners go out and come in, two by two. I have 
always felt rich in the possession of an ancient York 
tradition of an old fellow who demanded, as he lay 
dying, that the grass in his front yard should be cut 
at once ; it was no use to have it trodden down and 
spoilt by the folks at the funeral. I always hoped it 
W'as good hay weather ; but he must have been cer¬ 
tain of that when he spoke. Let us hope he did not 
confuse this world with the next, being so close upon 
the borders of it! It was not man-like to think of 
the front yard, since it was the special domain of the 
women, — the men of the family respected but ig 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


125 


nored it, — they had to be teased in the spring to 
ilig the flower beds, but it was the busiest time of 
the year ; one should remember that. 

I think many people are sorry, without knowing 
why, to see the fences pulled down; and the disap¬ 
pearance of plain white palings causes almost as deep 
regret as that of the handsome ornamental fences 
and their high posts with urns or great white balls 
on top. A stone coping does not make up for the 
loss of them; it always looks a good deal like a lot in 
a cemetery, for one thing; and then in a small town 
the grass is not smooth, and looks uneven where the 
flower-beds were not properly smoothed down. The 
stray cows trample about where they never went 
before ; the bushes and little trees that were once 
protected grow ragged and scraggly and out at el¬ 
bows, and a few forlorn flowers come up of them¬ 
selves and try hard to grow and to bloom. The un¬ 
gainly red tubs that are perched on little posts have 
plants in them, but the poor posies look as if they 
would rather be in the ground, and as if they are held 
.00 near the fire of the sun. If everything must be 
neglected and forlorn so much the more reason there 
should be a fence, if but to hide it. Americans are 
too fond of being stared at; they apparently feel as 
»f it were one’s duty to one’s neighbor. Even if there 


126 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


is nothing really worth looking at about a house it is 
still exposed to the gaze of the passers-by. Foreign¬ 
ers are far more sensible than we, and the out-of-door 
home life among them is something we might well 
try to copy; they often have their meals served out 
of doors, and one can enjoy an afternoon nap in a 
hammock, or can take one’s work out into the shady 
garden with great satisfaction, unwatched ; and even 
a little piece of ground can be made, if shut in and 
kept for the use and pleasure of the family alone, a 
most charming unroofed and trelKsed summer ante¬ 
room to the house. In a large, crowded town it 
would be selfish to conceal the rare bits of garden, 
where the sight of anything green is a godsend ; but 
where there is the whole wide country of fields and 
woods within easy reach I think there should be high 
walls around our gardens, and that we lose a great 
deal in not making them entirely separate from the 
highway ; as much as we should lose in making the 
walls of our parlors and dining-rooms of glass, and 
building the house as close to the street as possible. 

But to go back to the little front yards : we are 
Borry to miss them and their tangle or orderliness of 
roses and larkspur and honeysuckle, Canterbury 
bells and London pride, lilacs and peonies. These 
may all bloom better than ever in the new beds tha^ 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 127 

Are cut in the turf; but with the side fences that 
used to come from the corners of the house to the 
front fence, other barriers, as I have said here over 
and over, have been taken away, and the old-fash¬ 
ioned village life is becoming extinct. People do not 
know what they lose when they make way with the 
reserve, the separateness, the sanctity of the front 
yard of their grandmothers. It is like writing down 
the family secrets for any one to read; it is like 
having everybody call you by your first name and 
sitting in any pew in church, and like having your 
house in the middle of a road, to take away the fence 
which, slight as it may be, is a fortification round 
your home. More things than one may come in 
without being asked ; we Americans had better build 
more fences than take any away from our lives. 
There should be gates for charity to go out and ’n, 
and kindness and sympathy, too ; but his life and his 
house are together each man’s stronghold and castle, 
to be kept and defended. 

I was much amused once at thinking that the fine 
old solid paneled "doors were being unhinged faster 
than ever nowadays, since so many front gates have 
disappeared, and the click of the latch can no longer 
give notice of the approach of a guest. Now the 
knocker sounds or the bell rirgs without note o' 


128 


COUNTRY BY-WATS. 


warning, and the village housekeeper cannot see who 
is coming in until they have already reached the 
door. Once the guests could be seen on their way up 
the walk. It must be a satisfiictioii to look through 
the clear spots of the figured ground-glass in the new 
doors, and I believe if there is a covering inside few 
doors will be found unprovided with a peep-hole. It 
was better to hear the gate open and shut, and if it 
caught and dragged as front gates are very apt to do 
you could have time always for a good look out of 
the window at the approaching friend. 

There are few of us who cannot remember a front- 
yard garden which seemed to us a very paradise in 
childhood. It was like a miracle when the yellow and 
white daffies came into bloom in the spring, and there 
was a time when tiger-lilies and the taller rose-bushes 
were taller than we were, and we could not look over 
their heads as we do now. There were always a good 
many lady’s-delights that grew under the bushes, and 
came up anywhere in the chinks of the walk or the 
door-step, and there was a little green sprig called 
ambrosia that was a famous stray-away. Outside 
the fence one was not unlikely to see a company oi 
French pinks, which were forbidden standing-room 
inside as if they were tiresome poor relations of the 
other flowers. I always felt a sympathy for French 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


129 


pinks, — they have a fresh, sweet look, as if they re¬ 
signed themselves to their lot in life and made the 
best of it, and remembered that they had the sum 
shine and rain, and could see what was going on in 
tlie world, if they were outlaws. 

I like to remember being sent on errands, and be¬ 
ing asked to wait while the mistress of the house 
picked some flowers to send back to my mother. 
They were almost always prim, flat bouquets in those 
days ; the larger flowers were picked first and stood 
at the back and looked over the heads of those that 
were shorter of stem and stature, and the givers al¬ 
ways sent a message that tliey had not stopped to 
arrange them. I remember that I had even then a 
great dislike to lemon verbena, and that I would have 
waited patiently outside a gate all the afternoon if I 
knew that some one would kindly give me a sprig of 
lavender in the evening. And lilies did not seem to 
me overdressed, but it was easy for me to believe that 
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like a great 
yellow marigold, or even the dear little single ones 
that were yellow and brown, and bloomed until the 
snow came. 

I wish that I hail lived for a little while in those 
days when lilacs were a new fashion, and it was a 
great distinction to have some growing in a front 
9 


130 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


yard. It always seems as if lilacs and poplars be* 
longed to the same generation with a certain kind of 
New English gentlemen and ladies, who were ascetic 
and severe in some of their fashions, while in others 
they were more given to pleasuring and mild revelry 
than either their ancestors or the people who have 
lived in their houses since. Fifty years ago there 
seems to have been a last tidal wave of Puritanism 
which swept over the country, and drowned for a 
time the sober feasting and dancing which before had 
been considered no impropriety in the larger villages. 
Whist-playing was clung to only by the most worldly 
citizens, and, as for dancing, it was made a sin in it¬ 
self and a reproach, as if every step was taken will¬ 
fully in seven-leagued boots toward a place which is 
to be the final destination of all the wicked. 

A single poplar may have a severe and unchari¬ 
table look, but a row of them suggests the antique 
and pleasing pomp and ceremony of their early days, 
before the sideboard cupboards were only used to 
keep the boxes of strings and nails and the duster; 
and the best decanters were put on a high shelf, while 
the plain ones were used for vinegar in the kitchen 
closet. There is far less social visiting from house to 
house than there used to be. People in the smaller 
towns have more acquaintances who live at a distance 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


131 


than was the case before the days of railroads, and 
there are more guests who come trom a distance, 
which has something to do with making tea-parties 
and the entertainment of one’s neighbors less frequent 
than in former times. But most of the New Entj- 
land towns have changed their characters in the last 
twenty years, since the manufactories have come in 
and brought together large numbers either of foreign¬ 
ers or of a different class of people from those who 
used to make the most of the population. A certain 
class of families is rapidly becoming extinct. There 
will be found in the older villages very few persons 
left who belong to this class, which was once far 
more important and powerful; the oldest churches 
are apt to be most thinly attended simply because a 
different sort of ideas, even of heavenly things, at¬ 
tract the newer residents. I suppose that elderly 
people have said, ever since the time of Shem, Ham, 
and Japhet’s wives in the ark, that society is nothing 
to what it used to be, and we may expect to be al¬ 
ways told what unworthy successors we are of our 
grandmothers. But the fact remains that a certain 
element of American society is fast dying out, giving 
place to the new; and with all our glory and pride in 
modern progress and success we cling to the old as¬ 
sociations regretfully. There is nothing to take the 


132 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS, 


place of the pleasure we have in going to see our old 
friends in the parlors which have changed little since 
our childhood. No matter how advanced in years we 
seem to ourselves we are children still to the gracious 
hostess. Thank Heaven for the friends who have al¬ 
ways known us ! They may think us unreliable and 
young still; they may not understand that we have 
become busy and more or less important people to 
ourselves and to the world, — we are pretty sure to 
be without honor in our own country, but they will 
never forget us, and we belong to each other and al¬ 
ways shall. 

I have received many kindnesses at my friends’ 
hands, but I do not know that I have ever felt my¬ 
self to be a more fortunate or honored guest than I 
used years ago, when I sometimes went to call upon 
an elderly friend of my mother who lived in most 
pleasant and stately fashion. I used to put on my 
very best manner, and I have no doubt that my 
thoughts were well ordered, and my conversation as 
proper as I knew how to make it. I can remember 
tliat I used to sit on a tall ottoman, with nothing to 
^ean against, and my feet were off soundings, I was so 
high above the floor. We used to discuss the weather, 
and I said that I went to school (sometimes), or that 
it was then vacation, as the case might be, and we 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER, 


]33 


tried to make ourselves agreeable to each other. 
Presently my lady would take her keys out of her 
pocket, and sometimes a maid w^ould come to serve 
me, or else she herself would bring me a silver tray 
with some pound-cakes baked in hearts and rounds, 
anil a small glass of wine, and I proudly felt that I 
was a guest, though I was such a little thing an at¬ 
tention was being paid me, and a thrill of satisfaction 
used to go over me for my consequence and impor¬ 
tance. A handful of sugar-plums would have seemed 
nothing beside this entertainment. I used to be care¬ 
ful not to crumble the cake, and I used to eat it with 
my gloves on, and a pleasant fragrance would cling 
for some time afterward to the ends of the short Lisle- 
thread fingers. I have no doubt that my manners as 
I took leave were almost as distinguished as those of 
my hostess, though I might have been wild and shy 
all the rest of the week. It was not many years 
ago that I went to my old friend’s funeral — and saw 
them carry her down the long, wide walk, between 
the tall box borders which were her pride ; and all 
the air was heavy and sweet with the perfume of the 
early summer blossoms; the w'hite lilacs and the flow- 
eiing currants were still in bloom, and the rows of 
her dear Dutch tulips stood dismayed in their flaunt¬ 
ing colors and watched her go away. 


134 


COUNTRY BY-WAYh. 


My sketch of the already out-of-date or fast van* 
ishiiig village fashions perhaps should be ended here^ 
but I cannot resist a wish to add another bit of auto¬ 
biography of which I have been again and again re¬ 
minded in writing these pages. The front yard 1 
knew best belonged to my grandfather’s house. My 
grandmother was a proud and solemn woman, and 
she hated my mischief, and rightly thought my elder 
sister a much better child than I. I used to be afraid 
of her when I was in the house, but I shook off even 
her authority and forgot I was under anybody’s rule 
when I was out of doors. 1 was first cousin to a cat¬ 
erpillar if they called me to come in, and I was own 
sister to a giddy-minded bobolink when I ran away 
across the fields, as I used to do very often. But 
when I was a very little child indeed my world was 
bounded by the fences that were around my home ; 
there were wide green yards and tall elm-trees to 
shade them; there was a long line of barns and sheds, 
and one of these had a large room in its upper story, 
with an old ship’s foresail spread over the floor, and 
made a capital play-room in wet weather. Here fruit 
was spread in the fall, and there were some old chestf 
and pieces of furniture that had been discarded ; i* 
was like the garret, only much pleasanter. The chil 
dren in the villag^^ now cannot possibly be so happ^f 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


]35 


as I was then. I used to mount the fence next the 
street and watch the people go. in and out of the 
quaint-roofed village shops that stood in a row on the 
other side, and looked as if they belonged to a Dutch 
or old English town. They were burnt down long 
ago, but they were charmingly picturesque ; the upper 
stories sometimes projected over the lower, and the 
chimneys were sometimes clustered together and built 
of bright red bricks. 

And I was too happy when I could smuggle my¬ 
self into the front yard, with its four lilac bushes and 
its white fences to shut it in from the rest of the 
world, beside other railings that went from the porch 
down each side of the brick walk, which was laid in 
a pattern, and had H. C., 1818, cut deeply into one 
of the bricks near the door step. The H. C. was for 
Henry Currier, the mason, who had signed this choice 
bit of work as if it were a picture, and he had been 
dead so many years that I used to think of Ins ini¬ 
tials as if the corner brick were a little grave-stone 
for him. The knocker used to be so bright that it 
shone at you, and caught your eye bewilderingly, as 
you came in from the street on a sunshiny day 
There were very few flowers, for my grandmother was 
old and feeble when I knew her, and could not take 
care of them ; but I remember that there were blush 


136 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


roses, and white roses, and cinnamon roses all in a 
tangle in one corner, and I used to pick the crumpled 
petals of those to make myself a delicious coddle with 
ground cinnamon and damp brown sugar. In the 
spring T used to find the first green grass there, for 
it was warm and sunny, and I used to pick the little 
French pinks wnen they dared show their heads in 
the cracks of the flag-stones that were laid around 
the house. There were small shoots of lilac, too, and 
their leaves were brown and had a faint, sweet fra¬ 
grance, and a little later the dandelions came into 
bloom ; the largest ones I knew grew there, and they 
have always been to this day my favorite flowers. 

I had my trials and sorrows in this paradise, how¬ 
ever; I lost a cent there one day which I never have 
found yet ! And one morning, there suddenly ap¬ 
peared in one corner a beautiful, dL-dv^-hlyxe fieur-de-Us, 
and I joyfully broke its neck and carried it into the 
house, but everybody had seen it, and wondered that 
I could not have left it alone. Besides this, it befell 
me later to sin more gravely still ; my grandmother 
had kept some plants through the winter on a three- 
cornered stand built like a flight of steps, and when 
the warm spring weather came this was put out of 
doors. She had a cherished tea-rose bush, and what 
should I find but a bud on it; it was opened jus* 


FROM A MOURNFUL VILLAGER. 


137 


enough to give a hint of its color. I was very 
pleased ; I snapped it off at once, for I had heard so 
many times that it was hard to make roses bloom ; 
and I ran in through the hall and up the stairs, where 
I met my grandmother on the square landing. She 
sat down in the window-seat, and I showed her 
proudly what was crumpled in my warm little fist. 
I can see it now ! — it had no stem at all, and for 
many days afterward I was bowed down with a sense 
of my guilt and shame, for I was made to understand 
it was an awful thing to have blighted and broken a 
treasured flower like that. 

It must have been the very next winter that my 
grandmother died. She had a long illness which I do 
not remember much about; but the night she died 
might have been yesterday night, it is all so fresh and 
clear in my mind. I did not live with her in the old 
house then, but in a new house close by, across the 
yard. All the family were at the great house, and I 
could see that lights were carried hurriedly from one 
room to another. A servant came to fetch me, but I 
would not go with her; my grandmother was dying, 
whatever that might be, and slie was taking leave of 
every one — she was ceremonious even then. I did 
not dare to go with the rest; I had an intense curi¬ 
osity to see what dying might be like, but I was afraid 


138 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


to be there with her, and I was also afraid to stay at 
home alone. I was only five years old. It was in 
December, and the sky seemed to grow darker and 
darker, and I went out at last to sit on a door-step 
and cry softly to myself, and while I was there some 
one came to another door next the street, and rang 
the bell loudly again and again. I suppose I was 
afraid to answer the summons — indeed, I do not 
know that I thought of it; all the world had been 
still before, and the bell sounded loud and awful 
through the empty house. It seemed as if the mes¬ 
senger from an unknown world had come to the wrong 
house to call my poor grandmother away ; and that 
loud ringing is curiously linked in my mind with the 
knocking at the gate in “ Macbeth.” I never can 
think of one without the other, though there was 
no fierce Lady MAcbeth to bid me not be lost so poorly 
in my thoughts ; for when they all came back awed 
and tearful, and found me waiting in the cold, alone, 
and afraid more of this world than the next, they 
were very good to me. But as for the funeral, it gave 
me vast entertainment; it was the first grand public 
'KJcaoion in which I had taken any share. 



AN AUTUMN HOLTDAl^. 

\ 

--- ''X, 

'v^ 

HAD started early in the afternoon for a 
long walk ; it was just the weather for walk¬ 
ing, and I went across the fields with a de¬ 
lighted heart. The wind came straight in from the 
sea, and the sky was bright blue; there was a little 
tinge of red still lingering on the maples, and my dress 
brushed over the late golden-rods, while my old dog, 
who seemed to have taken a new lease of youth, 
jumped about wildly and raced after the little birds 
that flew up out of the long brown grass — the con¬ 
stant little chickadees, that would soon sing before 
the coming of snow. But tliis day brought no thought 
of winter; it was one of the October days when to 
breathe the air is like drinking wine, and every touch 
of the wind against one’s face is a*caress: like a quick, 
sweet kiss, that wind is. You have a sense of com¬ 
panionship ; it is a day that loves you. 














140 NTR Y BY-WA YS. 

I Went along, with this dear idle day for 

coDipanj^ it was a pleasure to be alive, and to go 
througJ the dry grass, and to spring over the stone 
Wails iiid the shaky pasture fences. I stopped by 
each of the stray apple-trees that came in my way, to 
make fiiends with it, or to ask after its health, if it 
Were an old friend. These old apple-trees make very 
ch-arming bits of the world in October ; the leaves 
cling to them later than to the other trees, and the 
turf keeps short and green underneath; and in this 
grass, which was frosty in the morning, and has not 
quite dried yet, you can find some cold little cider 
apples, with one side knurly, and one shiny bright 
red or yellow cheek. They are wet with dew, these 
little apples, and a black ant runs anxiously over them 
when you turn them round and round to see where 
the best place is to bite. There will almost always 
be a bird’s nest in the tree, and it is most likely to 
ue a robin’s nest. The prehistoric robins must have 
been cave dwellers, for they still make their nests as 
much like cellars as they can, though they follow the 
new fashion and build them aloft. One always has 
a thought of spring at the sight of a robin’s nest, I) 
is so little while ago that it was spring, and we wen 
so glad to have the birds come back, and the life o^ 
the new year was just showing itself; we were look 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


141 


inw forward to so much srrowth and to the realization 
and perfection of so many things. T think the sad¬ 
ness of autumn, or the pathos of it, is like that of 
elderly people. We have seen how the dowers looked 
when they bloomed and have eaten the fruit when it 
was ripe’; the questions have had their answer, the 
days we waited for have come and gone. Every¬ 
thing has stopped growing. And so the children 
have grown to be men and women, their lives have 
been lived, the autumn has come. We have seen 
what our lives would be like when we were older; 
success or disappointment, it is all over at any rate. 
Yet it only makes one sad to think it is autumn with 
the flowers or with one’s own life, when one forgets 
that always and always there will be the spring again. 

I am very fond of walking between the roads. One 
grows so familiar with the highways themselves. But 
once leap the fence and there are a hundred roads 
that you can take, each with its own scenery and en¬ 
tertainment. Every walk of this kind proves itself a 
tour of exploration and discovery, and the fields of 
my own town, which I think I know so well, are al¬ 
ways new fields. I find new ways to go, new sights 
io see, new friends among the things that grow, and 
aew treasures and pleasures every summer ; and later, 
»rh€ 1 the frosts have come and the swamps have 
frozen, I can go everywhere I like all over my world. 


142 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


That afternoon I found something I had never 
seen before — a little grave alone in a wide pasture 
which had once been a field. The nearest house was 
at least two miles away, but by hunting for it I found 
a very old cellar, where the child’s home used to be, 
not very far off, along the slope. It must have been 
a great many years ago that the house had stood 
there ; and the small slate head-stone was worn away 
by the rain and wind, so there was nothing to be 
read, if indeed there had ever been any letters on it. 
It had looked many a storm in the face, and many a 
red sunset. I suppose the woods near by had grown 
and been cut, and grown again, since it was put there. 
There was an old sweet-brier bush growing on the 
short little grave, and in the grass underneath I found 
a ground-sparrow’s nest. It was like a little neigh¬ 
borhood, and I have felt ever since as if I belonged 
to it; and I wondered then if one of the young 
ground-sparrows was not always sent to take the nest 
when the old ones were done with it, so they came 
back in the spring year after year to live there, and 
there were always the stone and the sweet-brier bush 
and the birds to remember the child. It was such a 
lonely place in that wide field under the great sky, 
and yet it was so comfortable too; but the sight of 
the little grave at first touched me strangely, and J 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


143 


tried to picture to myself the procession that came 
out from the liouse the day of the funeral, and I 
thought of the mother in the evening after all the 
people had gone home, and how she missed the baby, 
and kept seeing the new grave out here in the twilight 
RS slie went about her work. I suppose the family 
moved away, and so all the rest were buried else- 
wliere. 

I often think of this place, and I link it in my 
thoughts with something I saw once in the water 
when I was out at sea: a little boat that some child 
had lost, that had drifted down the river and out to 
sea; too long a voyage, for it was a sad little wreck, 
with even its white sail of a hand-breadth half under 
water, and its twine rigging trailing astern. It was 
a silly little boat, and no loss, except to its owner, to 
whom it had seemed as l^ave and proud a thing as 
any ship of the litie to you and me. It was a ship¬ 
wreck of his small hopes, I suppose, and I can see it 
now, the toy of the great winds and waves, as it 
floated on its way, while I sailed on mine, out of sight 
of land. 

The little grav’-e is forgotten by everybody but me, 
I think: the mother must have found the child again 
ill heaven a very long time ago : but in the winter 1 
»aall wonder if the snow has covered it well, and 


144 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


next year I shall go to see the sweet-brier bush when 
it is in bloom. God knows what use that life was, 
the grave is such a short one, and nobody knows 
whose little child it was; but perhaps a thousand peo¬ 
ple in the world to-day are better because it brought 
a little love into the world that was not there before. 

I sat so long here in the sun that the dog, after 
running after all the birds, and even chasing crickets, 
and going through a great piece of affectation in bark¬ 
ing before an empty woodchuck’s hole to kill time, 
came to sit patiently in front of me, as if he wished to 
ask when I would go on. I had never been in this part 
of the pasture before. It was at one side of the way I 
usually took, so presently 1 went on to find a favorite 
track of mine, half a mile to the right, along the bank 
of a brook. There had been heavy rains the week 
before, and I found more water than usual runninor 
and the brook was apparently in a great hurry. It 
was very quiet along the shore of it; the frogs had 
long ago gone into winter-quarters, and there was not 
one to splash into the water when he saw me coming. 
I did not see a musk-rat either, though I knew where 
their holes were by the piles of fresh-water mussel 
shells that they had untidily thrown out at their front 
door. I thought it might be well to hunt for mussels 
myself, and crack them in search of pearls, but it wai 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


145 


too serene and beautiful a day. I was not willing to 
disturb the comfort of even a sliell-lish. It was one 
of the days when one does not think of being tired : 
the scent of the dry everlasting flowers, and the fresh¬ 
ness of the wind, and the cawing of the crows, all 
come to me as I think of it, and I remember that I 
went a long way before I began to think of going 
home again. I knew I could not be far from a cross¬ 
road, and when I climbed a low hill I saw a house 
which I was glad to make the end of my walk — for a 
time, at any rate. It was some time since I had seen 
the old woman who lived there, and I liked her dear¬ 
ly, and was sure of a welcome. I went down through 
the pasture lane, and just then I saw my father drive 
away up the road, just too far for me to make him 
hear when I called. That seemed too bad at first, 
until I remembered that he would come back again 
over the same road after a while, and in the mean 
time I could make my call. The house was low and 
long and unpainted, with a great many frost-bitten 
flowers about it. Some hollyhocks were bowed down 
despairingly, and the morning-glory vines were more 
miserable still. Some of the smaller plants had been 
covered to keep them from freezing, and were brav- 
ng out a few more days, but no shelter would avail 
diem much longer. And already nobody minded 
10 


146 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


whether the gate was shut or not, and part of the 
great flock of hens were marching proudly about 
among the wilted posies, which they had stretched 
their necks wistfully through the fence for all sum¬ 
mer. I heard the noise of spinning in the house, and 
my dog scurried off after the cat as I went in the 
door. I saw Miss Polly Marsh and her sister, Mrs. 
Snow, stepping back and forward together spinning 
yarn at a pair of big wheels. The wheels made such 
a noise with their whir and creak, and my friends were 
talking so fast as they twisted and turned the yarn, 
that they did not hear my footstep, and I stood in the 
doorway watching them, it was such a quaint and 
pretty sight. They went together like a pair of horses, 
and kept step with each other to and fro. They were 
about the same size, and were cheerful old bodies, 
looking a good deal alike, with their checked handker¬ 
chiefs over their smooth gray hair, their dark gowns 
made short in the skirts, and their broad little feet in 
gray stockings and low leather shoes without heels. 
They stood straight, and though they were quick at 
their work they moved stiffly; they were talking 
busily about some one. 

“ I could tell by the way the doctor looked that he 
did n’t think there was much of anything the matter 
with her,” said Miss Polly Marsh. “ ‘ You need a’ 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


147 


tell me,’ says I, the other day, when I see him at 
Miss Martin’s. ‘ She’d be up and about this min¬ 
ute if she only had a mite o’ resolution ; ’ and says 
lie, ‘ Aunt Polly, you ’re as near right as usual; ’ ” 
and the old lady stopped to laugh a little. “ I told 
him that wa’n’t saying much,” said she, with an evi¬ 
dent consciousness of the underlying compliment and 
the doctor’s good opinion. “ I never knew one of 
that tribe that had n’t a queer streak and was n’t 
shif’less; but they’re tougher than ellurn roots;” 
and she gave the wheel an emphatic turn, while Mrs. 
Snow reached for more rolls of wool, and happened 
to see me. 

“ Wherever did you come from ? ” said they, in 
great surprise. “ Why, you was n’t anywhere in 
sight when I was out speaking to the doctor,” said 
Mrs. Snow. “ Oh, come over horseback, I suppose. 
Well, now, we ’re pleased to see ye.” 

“ No,” said I, “ I walked across the fields. It was 
too pleasant to stay in the house, and I have n’t had 
a long walk for some time before.” I begged them 
not to stop spinning, but they insisted that they 
should not have turned the wheels a halt-dozen times 
(nore, even if I had not come, and they pushed them 
back to the wall before they came to sit down to talk 
with me over their knitting — for neither of them 


148 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


were ever known to be idle. Mrs. Snow was only 
there for a visit; she was a widow, and lived during 
most of the year with her son ; and Aunt Polly was 
at home but seldom herself, as she was a famous 
nurse, and was often in demand all through that 
part of the country. I had known her all my days. 
Eveiybody was fond of the good soul, and she had 
been one of the most useful women in the world. 
One of my pleasantest memories is of a long but not 
very painful illness one winter, when she came to 
take care of me. There was no end either to her 
stories or her kindness. I was delighted to find her 
at home that afternoon, and Mrs. Snow also. 

Aunt Polly brought me some of her gingerbread, 
which she knew I liked, and a stout little pitcher of 
milk, and we sat there together for a while,- gossip¬ 
ing and enjoying ourselves. I told all the village 
news that I could think of, and I was just tired 
enough to know it, and to be contented to sit still for 
a while in the comfortable three-cornered chair by 
the little front window. The October sunshine lay 
along the clean kitchen floor, and Aunt Polly darted 
from her chair occasionally to catch stray little wisps 
of wool which the breeze through the door blew 
ilong from the wheels. There was a gay string of 
ed peppeis hanging over the very high mantel 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


149 


fchelf, and the wood-work in the room had never 
been painted, and had grown dark brown with age 
and smoke and scouring. The clock ticked solemnly, 
as if it were a judge giving the laws of time, and felt 
itself to be the only thing that did not waste it. 
There was a bouquet of asparagus and some late 
sprigs of larkspur and white petunias on the table 
underneath, and a Leavitt’s Almanac lay on the 
county paper, which was itself lying on the big Bible, 
of which Aunt Polly made a point of reading two 
chapters every day in course. I remember her say¬ 
ing, despairingly, one night, half to herself, “ I don’ 
know but I may skip the Chronicles next time,” but 
I have never to this day believed that she did. They 
asked me at once to come into the best room, but I 
liked the old kitchen best. “ Who was it that you 
were talking about as I came in ? ” said I. “ You 
said you did n’t believe there was much the matter 
with her.” And Aunt Polly clicked her knitting- 
needles faster, and told me that it was ISIary Susan 
Ash, over by Little Creek. 

“ They ’re dreadful nervous, all them Ashes,” said 
Mrs. Snow. “You know young Joe Adams’s wife, 
over our way, is a sister to her, and she’s forever 
ji-doctorin’. Poor fellow ! he ’s got a drag. I’m real 
Korry for Joe; but, land sakes alive! he might ’a 


150 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


known better. They said she had an old green band- 
box with a gingham cover, that was stowed full o’ 
vials, that she moved with the rest of her things 
when she was married, besides some she car’d in her 
hands. I guess she ain’t in no more hurry to go 
than any of the rest of us. I ’ve lost every mite of 
patience with her. I was over there last week one 
day, and she’d had a call from the new supply — 
you know Adams’s folks is Methodists — and he was 
took in by her. She made out she’d got the con¬ 
sumption, and she told how many complaints she 
had, and what a sight o’ medicine she took, and she 
groaned and sighed, and her voice was so weak you 
couldn’t more than just hear it. I stepped right 
into the bedroom after he’d been prayin’ with her, 
and was taking leave. You’d thought, by what he 
said, she was going right off then. She was cough¬ 
ing dreadful hard, and I knew she had n’t no more 
cough than I had. So says I, ‘ What’s the matter, 
Adaline ? I ’ll get ye a drink of water. Something 
in your throat, I s’pose. I hope you won’t go and 
get cold, and have a cough.’ She looked as if she 
could ’a bit me, but 1 was just as pleasant’s could 
be. Land! to see her laying there, I suppose the 
poor young fellow thought she was all gone. He 
meant well. I wish he had seen her eating apple 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


151 


dumplings for dinner. She felt better ’long in the 
drst o’ the afternoon before he come. I says to her, 
right before him, that I guessed them dumplings did 
her good, but she never made no answer. She will 
have these dyin’ spells. I don’t know’s she can help 
it, but she need n’t act as if it was a credit to any 
body to be sick and laid up. Poor Joe, be come 
over for me last week another day, and said she’d 
been havin’ spasms, and asked me if there wa’n’t 
something I could think of. ‘ Yes,’ says I; ‘ you 
just take a pail o’ stone-cold water, and throw it 
square into her face ; that’ll bring her out of it;’ 
and he looked at me a minute, and then he burst out 
a-laughing — he could n’t help it. He’s too good 
to her ; that’s the trouble.” 

“You never said that to her about the dump¬ 
lings ? ” said Aunt Polly, admiringly. “ Well, 1 
should n’t ha’ dared; ” and she rocked and knitted 
away faster than ever, while we all laughed. “Now 
with Mary Susan it’s different. 1 suppose she does 
have the neurology, and she’s a poor broken-down 
ci-eature. I do feel for her more than I do fur Ada- 
line. She was always a willing girl, and she worked 
herself to death, and she can’t help these notions, nor 
being an Ash neither.” 

“ I’m the last one to be hard on anybody that ’a 
uck, and in trouble,” said Mrs. Snow. 


152 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


“ Bless you, she set up with Ad’line herself three 
nights in one week, to my knowledge. It’s more ’a 
I would do,” said Aunt Polly, as if there were dan¬ 
ger that I should think Mrs. Snow’s kind heart to be 
made of flint. 

“ It ain’t what I call watching,” said she, apolo¬ 
getically. “ We both doze off, and then when the 
folks come in in the morning she ’ll tell what a suf¬ 
ferin’ night she’s had. She likes to have it said she 
has to have watchers.” 

“ It’s strange what a queer streak there is run¬ 
ning through the whole of ’em,” said Aunt Polly, 
presently. It always was so, far back’s you can 
follow ’em. Did you ever hear about that great- 
uncle of theirs that lived over to the other side o’ 
Denby, over to what they call the Denby Meadows ? 
We had a cousin o’ my father’s that kept house for 
him (he was a single man), and I spent most of a 
summer and fall with her once when I was growing 
up. She seemed to want company: it was a lone¬ 
some sort of a place.” 

“ Tliere ! I don’t know when I have thought o’ 
that,” said Mrs. Snow, looking much amused. “ What 
stories you did use to tell, after you come home, 
4bout the way he used to act! Dear sakes ! she used 
to keep us laughing till we was tired. Do tell her 
about him, Polly ; she ’ll like to hear.” 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


153 


Well, I ’ve forgot a good deal about it: you see 
It was much as fifty years ago. I was n’t more than 
seventeen or eighteen years old. He was a very re¬ 
spectable man, old Mr. Dan’el Gunn was, and a cap’n 
in the militia in his day. Cap’n Gunn, they always 
called him. He was well off, but he got sun-struck, 
and never was just right in his mind afterward. 
When he was getting over his sickness after the 
stroke he was very wandering, and at last he seemed 
to get it into his head that he was his own sister Pa¬ 
tience that died some five or six years before: she 
was single too, and she always lived with him. They 
said when he got so’s to sit up in his arm-chair of an 
afternoon, when he was getting better, he fought ’em 
dreadfully because they fetched him his own clothes 
to put on; he said they was brother Dan’el’s clothes. 
So, sure enough, they got out an old double gown, 
and let him put it on, and he was as peaceable as 
could be. The doctor told ’em to humor him, but 
they thought it was a fancy he took, and he would 
forget it; but the next day he made ’em get the 
double gown again, and a cap too, and there he used 
to set up alongside of his bed as prim as a dish. Wheu 
he got round again so he could set up all day, they 
thought he wanted the dress ; but no ; he seemed to 
be himself, and had on his own clothes just as usuid 


154 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


in the morning; but when he took his nap after din¬ 
ner and waked up again, he was in a dreadful frame 
o’ mind, and had the trousers and coat off in no time, 
and said he was Patience. He used to fuss with 
some knitting-work he got hold of somehow; he was 
good-natured as could be, and sometimes he would 
make ’em fetch him the cat, because Patience used 
to have a cat that set in her lap while she knit. I 
was n’t there then, you know, but they used to tell 
me about it. Folks used to call him Miss Dan’el 
Gunn. 

“ He’d been that way some time when I went 
over. I’d heard about his notions, and I was scared 
of him at first, but I found out there wasn’t no need. 
Don’t you know I was sort o’ ’fraid to go, ’Lizabeth, 
when Cousin Statiry sent for me after she went home 
from that visit she made here ? She’d told us about 
him, but sometimes, ’long at the first of it, he used to 
be cross. He never was after I went there. He 
was a clever, kind-hearted man, if ever there was 
one,” said Aunt Polly, with decision. “ He used to 
go down to the corner to the store sometimes in the 
morning, and he would see to business. And before 
he got feeble sometimes he would work out on the 
farm all the morning, stiddy as any of the men ; but 
^fter he come in to dinner he would take off his coat 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


155 


if he had it on, and fall asleep in his arm-chair, or on 
a I’linge there was in his bedroom, and when he 
waked up he would be sort of bewildered for a while, 
and then he’d step round quick’s he could, and get 
his dress out o’ the clothes-press, and the cap, and put 
’em on right over the rest of his clothes. He was 
always small-featured and smooth-shaved, and I don’ 
know as, to come in sudden, you would have thought 
he was a man, except his hair stood up short and 
straight all on the top of his head, as men-folks had 
a fashion o’ combing their hair then, and I must say 
he did make a dreadful ordinary-looking woman. 
The neighbors got used to his ways, and, land ! I 
never thought nothing of it after the first week or 
two. 

“ His sister’s clothes that he wore first was too 
small for him, and so my cousin Statiry, that kep’ 
his house, she made him a linsey-woolsey dress with 
a considerable short skirt, and he was dreadful 
pleased with it, she said, because the other one never 
would button over good, and showed his wais’coat, 
and she and I used to make him caps; he used to 
wear the kind all the old women did then, with a big 
crown, and close round the face. I’ve got some laid 
away up-stairs now that was my mother’s — she wore 
caps very young, mother did. His nephew that lived 


156 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


with him carried on the farm, and managed the bush 
ness, but he always treated the cap’n as if he was 
head of everything there. Everj^body pitied the 
cap’n; folks respected him ; but you couldn’t help 
laughing, to save ye. We used to try to keep him 
in, afternoons, but we could n’t always.” 

“Tell her about that day he went to meeting,” 
said Mrs. Snow. 

“ Why, one of us always used to stay to home 
with him ; we took turns; and somehow or ’nother 
he never offered to go, though by spells he would be 
constant to meeting in the morning. Why, bless 
you, you never’d think anything ailed him a good 
deal of the time, if you saw him before noon, though 
sometimes he would be freaky, and hide himself in 
the barn, or go over in the woods, but we’always 
kept an eye on him. But this Sunday there was 
going to be a great occasion. Old Parson Croden 
was going to preach; he was thought more of than 
anybody in this region : you’ve heard tell of him a 
good many times, I s’pose. He was getting to be 
old, and didn’t preach much. He had a colleague, 
they set so much by him in his parish, and I did n’t 
knew’s I’d ever get another chance to hear him, so 
I did n’t want to stay to home, and neither did Cousiu 
Statiry; and Jacob Gunn, old Mr. Gunn’s nephew, he 


AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


157 


said it might be the last time ever he’d hear Par¬ 
son Croden, and he set in the seats anyway; so 
we talked it all over, and we got a young boy to 
come and set ’long of the cap’n till we got back. 
He hadn’t offered to go anywhere of an afternoon 
for a long time. I s’pose he thought women ought 
to be stayers at home according to Scripture. 

“ Parson Ridley — his wife was a niece to old Dr. 
Croden — and the old doctor they was up in the 
pulpit, and the choir was singing the first hymn — it 
was a fuguing tune, and they was doing their best: 
seems to me it was ‘ Canterbury New.’ Yes, it was ; 
I remember I thought how splendid it sounded, and 
Jacob Gunn he was a-leading off; and I happened to 
look down the aisle, and who should I see but the 
poor old cap’n in his cap and gown parading right 
into meetinor before all the folks ! There ! I wanted 
to go through the floor. Everybody ’most had seen 
him at home, but, my goodness ! to have him come 
into meeting ! ” 

“ What did you do ? ” said I. 

“ AVhy, nothing,” said Miss Polly; “ there was 
nothing to do. I thought 1 should faint away; but 
1 called Cousin Siatiry’s ’tention, and she looked 
dreadful put to it for a minute ; and then says she, 
Open the door for him ; I guess he won’t make no 


158 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


trouble,’ and, poor soul, be did n’t. But to see him 
come up the aisle ! He’d fixed himself nice as he 
could, poor creator ; he’d raked out Miss Patience’s 
old Navarino bonnet with green ribbons and a wil¬ 
low feather, and set it on right over his cap, and he 
had her bead bag on his arm, and her turkey-tail fan 
that he’d got out of the best room ; and he come 
with little short steps up to the pew : and I s’posed 
he’d set by the door ; but no, he made to go by us, up 
into the corner where she used to set, and took her 
place, and spread his dress out nice, and got his hand¬ 
kerchief out o’ his bag, just’s he’d seen her do. He 
took off his bonnet all of a sudden, as if he’d forgot 
it, and put it under the seat, like he did his hat — 
that was the only thing he did that any woman 
would n’t have done — and the crown of his cap was 
bent some. I thought die I should. The pew was 
one of them up aside the pulpit, a square one, you 
know, right at the end of the right-hand aisle, so I 
could see the length of it and out of the door, and 
there stood that poor boy we’d left to keep the cap’n 
company, looking as pale as ashes. We found he’d 
tried every way to keep the old gentleman at home, 
but he said he got f’erce as could be, so he did n’t 
dare to say no more, and Cap’n Gunn drove him 
Vack twice to the house, and that’s why he got in so 


an autumn holiday. 


159 


late. I didn’t know but it was the boy that had set 
him on to go to meeting when 1 see him walk in, 
and I could ’a wrung his neck ; but I guess I mis¬ 
judged him; he was called a stiddy boy. He mar¬ 
ried a daughter of Ichabod Piukham’s over to Oak 
Plains, and I saw a son of his when I was taking 
care of Miss West last spring through that lung 
fever — looked like his father. I wish I’d thought 
to tell him about that Sunday. I heard he was wait¬ 
ing on that pretty Becket girl, the orphan one that 
lives with Nathan Becket. Her father and mother 
was both lost at sea, but she’s got property.” 

“ What did they say in church when the captain 
came in. Aunt Polly ? ” said I. 

“ Well, a good many of them laughed — they 
could n’t help it, to save them ; but the cap’n he 
was some hard o’ bearin’, so he never noticed it, and 
he set there in the corner and fanned him, as pleased 
and satisfied as could be. The singers they had the 
worst time, but they had just come to the end of a 
verse, and they played on the instruments a good 
while in between, but I could see ’em shake, and I 
s’pose the tune did sti-ay a little, though they wen. 
through it well. And after the first fun of it was 
over, most of the folks felt bad. You see, the cap’n 
had been very much looked up to, and it was his mis 


IGO 


COUNTRY BY-WATS. 


fortune, and he set there quiet, listening to the preach¬ 
ing. I see some tears in some o’ the old folks’ eyes • 
they hated to see him so broke in his mind, you 
know. There was more than usual of ’em out that 
day ; they knew how bad he’d feel if he realized it. 
A good Christian man he was, and dreadful precise, 
I’ve heard ’em say.” 

“ Did he ever go again ? ” said I. 

“ I seem to forget,” said Aunt Polly. “ I dare 
say. I was n’t there but from the last of June into 
November, and when I went over again it was n’t 
for three years, and the cap’n had been dead some 
time. Plis mind failed him more and more along 
at the last. But I ’ll tell 3'ou what he did do, and 
it was the week after that very Sunday, too. He 
heard it given out from the pulpit that the Female 
Missionary Society would meet with Mis’ William 
Sands the Thursday night o’ that week — the sewing 
society, you know ; and he looked round to us real 
knowing; and Cousin Statiry, says she to me, under 
her bonnet, ‘ You don’t s’pose he ’ll want to go ? ’ 
and I like to have laughed right out. But sure 
enough he did, and what do you suppose but he made 
us fix over a handsome black watered silk for him 
to wear, that had been his sister’s best dress. He 
laid he’d outgrown it dreadful quick. Cousin St/itiry 


AX AUTUMN HOLIDAY. 


161 


^Iie wished to heaven she’d thought to put it xway, 
for Jacob had given it to her, and she was n waning 
to make it over for herself ; but it did n’t do to cross 
the cap’ll and Jacob Gunn gave Statiry another 
one — the best he could get, but it wasn’t near so 
good a piece, she thought. He set everything by 
Statiry, and so did the cap’n, and well they might. 

“ We hoped he’d forget all about it the next day ; 
but he did n’t; and I always thought well of those 
ladies, they treated him so handsome, and tried to 
make him enjoy himself. He did eat a great sup¬ 
per ; they kep’ a-piling up his plate with every¬ 
thing. I could n’t help wondering if some of ’em 
would have put themselves out much if it had been 
some poor flighty old woman. The cap’n he was 
as polite as could be, and when Jacob come to walk 
home with him he kissed ’em all round and asked 
’em to meet at his house. But the greatest was—• 
land! I don’t know when I’ve thought so much 
about those times — one afternoon he was setting 
at home in the keeping-room, and Statiry was there, 
and Deacon Abel Pinkham stopped in to see Jacob 
Gunn about building some fence, and he found he'd 
gone to mill, so he waited a while, talking friendly, as 
they expected Jacob might be home; and the cap’n 
Jvas as pleased as could be, and he urged the deacon 
11 


1G2 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


to stop to tea. And when he went away, says he to 
Statiry, in a dreadful knowing way, ‘ Which of ua 
do you consider the deacon come to see ? ’ You 
see, the deacon was a widower. Bless you ! when 
I first come home I used to set everybody laughing, 
but I forget most of the things now. There was one 
day, though ” — 

“ Here comes your father,” said Mrs. Snow. 
“ Now we must n’t let him go by or you ’ll have to 
walk ’way home.” And Aunt Polly hurried out to 
speak to him, while I took my great bunch of golden- 
rod, which already drooped a little, and followed her, 
with Mrs. Snow, who confided to me that the cap¬ 
tain’s nephew Jacob had offered to Polly that sum¬ 
mer she was over there, and she never could see why 
she didn’t have him : only love goes where it is sent, 
and Polly was n’t one to marry for what she could 
get if she did n’t like the man. There was plenty 
that would have said yes, and thank you too, sir, to 
Jacob Gunn. 

That was a pleasant afternoon. I reached home 
when it was growing dark and chilly, and the early 
autumn sunset had almost faded in the west. It was 
a much longer way home around by the road thar 
3y the way I had come across the fields. 



A WINTER DRIVE. 


T is very hard to find one’s way in winter over 
a road where one has only driven once in 
summer. The landmarks change their ap¬ 
pearance so much when the leaves are gone that, un¬ 
less the road is straight and certain, and you have a 
good sense of locality, you will be puzzled over and 
over aofain. In summer a few small trees and a 
thicket of bushes at the side of the road will look like 
a bit of forest, but in winter you look through tliem 
and over them, and they disappear almost altogether, 
they are such thin gray twigs, and take up so much 
less room in the world, though you may notice a well- 
thatched bird’s-nest or some red berries, or a few flut¬ 
tering leaves which the wind has failed to blow away. 
There is a bare, thin, comfortless aspect of nature 
which is chilling to look at either before the snow 
monies or afterward; you long for the poor earth to be 









164 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


able to warm herself again by the fire of the summer 
sun. The white birches’ bark looks out of season, as 
if they were still wearing their summer clothes, and 
the wretched larches which stand on the edges of the 
swamps look as if they had been intended for ever¬ 
greens, but had been somehow unlucky, and were in 
destitute circumstances. It seems as if the pines and 
hemlocks ought to show Christian charity to these 
sad and freezing relations. 

The world looks as if it were at the mercy of the 
wind and cold in winter, and it would be useless to 
dream that such a time as spring would follow these 
apparently hopeless days if we had not history and 
experience to reassure us. What a sorrowful doom 
the first winter must have seemed to Adam if he ever 
took a journey to the northward after he was sent 
from Paradise! It must have been to him a most 
solemn death and ending of all vegetable life, yet he 
might have taken a grim satisfaction in the thought 
that no more apples could ever get ripe to tempt him 
or anybody else, and that the mischief-making fruits 
of the earth were cursed as well as he. 

In winter there is, to my mind, a greater beauty 
in a leafless tree than in the same tree covered with 
Its weight and glory of summer leaves. Then it h 
one great mass of light and shadow against the land 


A WINTER DRIVE, 


165 


scape or the sky, but in winter the tracery of the 
bare branches against a white cloud or a clear yellow 
sunset is a most exquisite thing to see. It is the dif¬ 
ference between a fine statue and a well painted pict¬ 
ure, and seems a higher art, like that, — but it is 
always a puzzle to me why a dead tree in summer 
should be a painful thing to look at. One instantly 
tells the difference between a dead twior and a live 

O 

one close at hand. Such a leafless tree cannot give 
the pleasure that it did in winter. Yet it looked al¬ 
most the same in cold weather w^hen it was alive; is 
it our unreasoning horror of death, or is it that a bit 
of winter in the midst of summer is like a skeleton 
at the feast ? 

A drive in a town in winter should be taken for 
three reasons: for the convenience of getting from 
place to place, for the pleasure of motion in the 
fresh air, or for the satisfaction of driving a horse, 
but for the real delight of the thing it is necessary to 
go far out from even the villages across the country. 
You can see the mountains like great stacks of clear 
ice all along the horizon, and the smaller hills cov¬ 
ered with trees and snow together, nearer at hand, 
and the great expanse of snow lies north and south, 
^ast and west all across the fields. In my own part 
of the country, which is heavily wooded, the pine for- 


166 


COUNTRY BY-WATS. 


ests give the world a black and white look that ia 
very dismal when the sun is not shining; the farm¬ 
ers’ houses look lonely, and it seems as if they had 
crept nearer together since the leaves fell, and they 
are no longer hidden from each other. The hills 
look larger, and you can see deeper into the woods 
as you drive along. Nature brings out so many 
treasures for us to look at in summer, and adorns 
the world with such lavishness, that after the frost 
comes it is like an empty house, in which one misses 
all the pictures and drapery and the familiar voices. 

This was a drive that I liked. It was a sunshiny 
midwinter day, with a wind that one was glad to fall 
in with and not try to fight against, and the great 
white horse ran before it like a boat, the crooked 
country roads had been just enough smoothed and 
trodden by the wood teams to make good sleighing, 
I met now and then a farmer on his way to market 
with a load of fire-wood piled high and square on his 
sled, and the oxen were frosted, and pushed at the 
yoke and bumped together awkwardly, as if they 
gould not walk evenly with their crooked knees. 
There was a bundle of corn-stalks on top the load, 
and usually the driver’s blue mittens were on the 
sled stakes, with the thumbs out at right angles, as if 
some spirit of the woodlands were using them tc 


A WINTER DRIVE. 


167 


show the protesting hands he lifted at the irreverence 
of men. It was many years before I ever felt very 
sorry when woods were cut down. There were some 
acute griefs at the loss of a few familiar trees, but 
now I have a heart-ache at the sight of a fresh clear¬ 
ing, and I follow as sadly along the road behind a 
great pine log as if I were its next of kin and chief 
mourner at its funeral. There is a great difference 
between being a live tree that holds its head so high 
in the air that it can watch the country for miles 
around, — that has sheltered a thousand birds and 
families of squirrels and little wild creatures, — that 
has beaten all the storms it ever fought with; such 
a difference between all this and being a pile of 
boards! 

I believe that there are few persons who cannot re¬ 
member some trees which are as much connected with 
their own lives as people are. When they stand be¬ 
side them there is at once a feeling of very great af 
fection. It seems as if the tree remembered what we 
remember ; it is something more than the fact of its 
having been associated with our past. Almost every¬ 
body is very fond of at least one tree. Morris’s appeal 
to the woodman struck a responsive chord in many 
an otherwise unsentimental heart, — but happy is the 
man who has a laro-e acquaintance, and who make? 


168 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


friends with a new tree now and then as he goes on 
throuofh the world. There was an old doctrine called 
Hylozoism, which appeals to my far from Pagan 
sympathies, the theory of the soul of the world, of a 
life residing in nature, and that all matter lives ; the 
doctrine that life and matter are inseparable. Trees 
arc to most people as inanimate and unconscious as 
rocks, but it seems to me that there is a good deal to 
say about the strongly marked individual characters, 
not only of the conspicuous trees that have been civ¬ 
ilized and. are identified with a home, or a familiar 
bit of landscape or an event in history, but of those 
that are crowded together in forests. There is a 
strange likeness to the characteristics of human beings 
among these, there is the same proportion of igno¬ 
rant rabble of poor creatures who are struggling for 
life in more ways than one, and of self-respecting, 
well-to-do, dignified citizens. It is not wholly a ques 
tion of soil and of location any more than it is with 
us. Some trees have a natural vitality and bravery 
which makes them push their roots into the ground 
and their branches toward the sky. and although they 
started to grow on a rock or on the sand, where we 
should be sure that a tree would have a hard struggle 

oo 

to keep alive, and would be stunted and dwarfed at 
any rate, yet they grow tall and strong, and in their 


A WINTER DRIVE. 


169 


wealth of usefulness they are like some of the world’s 
great men who rose from poverty to kingliness. 
How easy it is to carry out the likeness. The great 
tree is a protection to a thousand lesser interests, a 
central force which keeps in motion and urges on a 
thousand activities. 

It is common to praise a man more who has risen 
from obscurity to greatness than one who had money 
and friends at the start, but there is after all little 
difference in the amount of personal exertion that 
must be brought to bear. If a man or a tree has it 
in him to grow, who can say what will hinder him. 
Many a tree looks starved and thin, and is good for 
nothing, that was planted in good soil, and the grand¬ 
est pines may have struggled among the rocks until 
they find soil enough to feed them, and when they 
are fully grown the ledges that were in the way of 
their roots only serve to hold them fast and strengthen 
them against any chance of overthrow. There is 
something in the constitution of character ; it is vigor¬ 
ous and will conquer, or it is weak and anything will 
defeat it. I believe that it is more than a likeness be¬ 
tween the physical natures, there is something deeper 
than that. We are hardly willing yet to say that the 
higher animals are morally responsible, but it is im¬ 
possible for one who has been a great deal among 


l70 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


trees to resist the instinctive certainty that they have 
thought and purpose, that they deliberately anticipate 
the future, or that they show traits of character which 
one is forced to call good and evil. How low down 
in the scale of existence we may find the first glimmer 
of self-consciousness nobody can tell, but it is as easy 
to be certain of it in the higher orders of vegetable life 
as in the lower orders of animals. Man was the latest 
comer into this world, and he is just beginning to get 
acquainted with his neighbors, that is the truth of 
it. It is curious to read the old stories of the hama¬ 
dryads and see the ways in which the life of trees has 
been dimly recognized. They mean more than has 
been supposed, but the trees’ own individuality was 
ignored, and an imaginary race of creatures invented, 
and supposed to live in them — these spirits of tho 
trees accounted for things that could not otherwise be 
explained, but they were too much like people, the 
true nature and life of a tree could never be exactly 
personified. 

Most trees like most people are collected into great 
neighborhoods, and one only knows them in com¬ 
panies, as one looks at a strange town when on a 
journey and thinks of it only as a town without re¬ 
membering that it is made up of old and young lives, 
each with its own interests and influence. Perhaps 


A DRIVE. 


171 


as you go by, you notice a few faces in the street or 
at the railway station, and so, when a country road 
is at the edge of some woods you notice the woods, 
and perhaps say to yourself that there is a fine wal¬ 
nut-tree or an oak, but there are no two trees that 
look alike or are alike, any more than there are two 
persons exactly similar in shape or nature. It is a 
curious thing to see the difference of race so strongly 
marked — an oak among white pines is like an Eng¬ 
lishman among the Japanese, and wholly a foreigner 
in such society. There is a nobility among trees as 
well as among men, not fancied by poets but real and 
unaffected. One likes to see such a grand family of 
oaks as that at Waverley, and is delighted at the 
thought of their long companionship; and what is 
more imposing than a row of elms standing shoulder to 
shoulder before a fine old house? They have watched 
the people come out for the first time, and for the 
last time, they have known the family they have shel¬ 
tered. There seems to be often a curious linking 
of the two lives, which makes a tree fade and die 
when the man or woman dies with whom it has been 
associated ; such stories are common in every village, 
■— there is a superstition that the withering of a tree 
near a house is the sign of impending disaster — 
many persons believe that there is somcthiDg more 


172 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


than coincidence and chance about it, and it may be 
at least that these signs, and others that come true, 
will be proved some day to be veritable warnings, 
to break the force of a blow that otherwise would be 
too sudden and severe. 

Five or six miles from the village I left the road 
that leads down to the sea and turned off toward the 
hill called Agamenticus. From some high land which 
has to be crossed first there is a fine view of the 
northern country with the procession of mountains, of 
which Mt. Washington is captain, ranged in marching 
order on the horizon. Saddleback and its comrades 
in Deerfield and Strafford brought up the rear, and 
they were all pale blue in the afternoon light. The 
nearer hills looked wind-swept and forlorn and the 
lowlands desolate, and the world was like a great 
garden that was spoiled and blackened by frost. The 
snow glistened and the wind blew it off the edges of 
the great drifts as if it were the spray of those frozen 
waves. The smoke was coming out of the kitchen 
chimneys of the farm-houses, and I saw faces quickly 
appear at the windows as I went by. All the women 
hurry when they hear sleigh-bells or the sound of a 
passer-by in those lonely neighborhoods, and it is dif 
ficult to tell whether you give most pleasure by being 


A WINTER DRIVE. 


173 


k /riend v^ho will tell the news or do an errand along 
the road, or by being a stranger who drives an un¬ 
known horse. Then you are made the subject of 
reflection and inquiry, and for perhaps a day or two 
you are like an exciting chapter that ends abruptly in 
a serial novel. 

Once over the hills there came in sight a long 
narrow pond which lies at the foot of Agamenticus ; 
and as I passed the saw-mill at the lower end by the 
bridge I saw a well-worn sled track on the ice, and I 
had too strong a temptation to follow it to be resisted. 
The pond seemed like a river, the distance was not 
great across from shore to shore, and the banks were 
high and irregular and covered in most places with 
pines. I had heard that there was a good deal of 
logging going on in the region, and it was the best 
possible chance to get into a swampy tract of country 
which is inaccessible in summer, and which I have 
always wished to explore. For perhaps three quar¬ 
ters of a mile I went up the pond, often between the 
rows of logs which were lying on the ice waiting for 
the time when they would melt their way into the 
water and float down to be sawed. I found a cross 
track which led in the direction I wished to take, and 
once in the woods there was no wind, and the air was 
itill and clear and sweet with the cold and resinous 


174 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


odor of the trees. The wood-road was not very 
smooth and the horse chose his own way slowly while I 
looked around to see what could be seen. The woods 
were almost still, only the blue jays cried once or 
twice, and sometimes a lump of snow would fall from 
the bough of a tall pine down through the branches 
of the lower trees. There were a great many rabbit 
tracks, those odd clover-leaf marks, deep in the light 
snow which had fallen the night before, and there 
were partridge tracks around some bushes to which a 
few dried berries were still clinging, but the creatures 
themselves were nowhere to be seen. It must be a 
dreadful thing to be lost in the woods in winter ! 
The cold itself soon puts an end to one, luckily; but 
to be hungry in such a place, and cold too, is most 
miserable. It makes one shudder, the thought of a 
lost man hurrying through the forest at night-fall, the 
shadows startling him and chasing him, the trees 
standing in his way and looking always the same as 
if he were walking in a treadmill, the hemlocks hold¬ 
ing out handfuls of snow at the end of their branches 
R.S if they offered it mockingly for food. 

The people who live in the region of the Agamen- 
t cus woods have a good deal of superstition about 
them ; they say it is easy to get lost there, but they 
are very vague in what they say of the danger! 


A WINTER DRIVE. 


175 


that are to be feared. It may be like an unreasoning 
fear of the dark, but sometimes there is a suggestion 
that the bears may not all be dead, and almost every 
year there is a story told of a wild-cat that has bepn 
seen, of uncommon size ; and as for a supernatural 
population, I think that passes for an unquestioned 
fact. I have often heard people say that there are 
parts of the woods where they would not dare to go 
alone, and where nobody has ever been, but I could 
never succeed in lomting them. The swamps at ihe 
foot of the mountain are traversed in winter pretty 
thoroughly and the lirst and second, and sometimes 
even the third, growth of pines have been cut off from 
all that district, so the land has all been walked over 
at one time and another — since there are few trees 
of the older generation left in all that part of the 
town. T dare say there is a little fear of the hill 
itself ; perhaps a relic of the old belief that the gods 
had their abodes in mountains. So high a hill as 
Agamenticus could not fail to be respected in this 
(for the most ))art) low-lying country, and in spite of 
its bai-ely seven hundred feet of heiglit it is as pi-om- 
inent a landmark for fifteen or tw’enty miles inland 
as it is for sailors who are coming toward the coast, 
ar for the fishermen who go in and out daily from 
the neighboring shores. I have often been asked 


176 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


about the legend of an uncertain St. Aspenquid, —■ 
whose funeral ceremonies on this mountain are repre¬ 
sented as having been most imposing, but I never 
could trace this legend beyond a story in one of the 
county newspapers, and I have never heard any tra¬ 
dition among the people that bears the least likenesa 
to it. 

I caught now and then a glimpse of the top of Aga- 
menticus as I drove through the woods that bright 
winter day, and I wished it were possible for any 
one, not a practiced mountain climber, to scramble up 
through the drifts and over the icy ledges. I should 
like to see the winter landscape, the wide-spread coun¬ 
try, the New Hampshire mountains, and the sea ; for 
one can follow the coast line from Gloucester on Cape 
Ann to Portland with one’s unaided eyesight; so well 
planted is this hill which might be called the watch- 
tower on the western gates of Maine. 

In the woods there was the usual number of stray- 
away trees to be seen, and they appealed to my sym¬ 
pathy as much as ever. It is not pleasant to see an 
elm warped and twisted with its efforts to get to the 
light, and to hold its head above the white pines that 
are growing in a herd around it and seem to grudge 
it its rights and its living. If you cannot be just like 
as, they seem to say, more’s the pity for you ! You 


A fF/Nr£Ii DRIVE. 


177 


Rliould grow as we do and be like us. If your nature 
is not the same as ours you ought to make it so. 
These trees make one think of people who have had 
to grow in loneliness ; who have been liindered and 
crowded and mistaken and suspected by their neigh¬ 
bors, and have suffered terribly for the sin of being 
themselves and following their own natures. Yet I 
have often seen trees who seem to be hermits and 
recluses of their own accord — not forced absentees 
from their families. Apple-trees, in spite of their 
association with the conventional life of orchards and 
the neighborhood of buildings, do not seem unhappy 
at the sunshiny edge of a piece of woods, especially 
if they are near a road. Perhaps they like living 
alone, as many people do — they are glad to be freed 
from the restraints of society, and are very well off 
where they are; though a lonely domesticated tree 
would seem, naturally, to be most forlorn, an elm 
among pines or an oak among hemlocks seems to 
draw attention to its sufferings far more eagerly. An 
apple-tree seems willing to make itself at home .any¬ 
where, but it is sure to get amusingly untidy and law¬ 
less. as if it needed to be preached to as well as 
pruned. There are many trees, however, that always 
gravitate into each other’s society and live in peace 
ind harmony with each other — well ordered neigh 
12 


178 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


borhoods where there is a good chance for everybody 
to get his living. 

I have remembered a great many times an old li¬ 
lac tree that‘I once saw in bloom by a deserted 
farm-house. It was in so secluded a place on a dis¬ 
used road that it could not be sure it was not the 
last of its race. The earth was washed away from 
its roots, and it was growing discouraged; it was like 
a sick man’s face at a window. 1 do not believe that 
•it will bloom many more springs. But there is an¬ 
other solitary tree which is a great delight to me, and 
I go to pay it an afternoon visit every now and then, 
far away from the road across some fields and past¬ 
ures. It is an ancient pitch-pine, and it grows be¬ 
side a spring, and has acres of room to lord it over. 
It thinks everything of itself, and although it is an 
untidy housekeeper, and flings its dry twigs and sticky 
cones all around the short grass underneath, I have 
a great affection for it. I like pitch-pines better 
than any trees in the world at any rate, and this is 
the dearest of its race. I sit down in the shade of 
it and the brook makes a good deal of noise as i 
starts out from the spring under the bank, and there 
always is a wind blowing overhead among the stiff 
green branches. The old tree is very wise, it sees 
that much of the world’s business is great foolishness 


A WJNTA'H DRIVE. 


179 


and yet when I have been a fool myself and wander 
away out of doors to think it over, I always find a 
more cheerful atmosphere, and a more sensible aspect 
to my folly, under the shadow of this friend of mine. 
I think it is likely to live until the new houses of 
the town creep over to it, past Butler’s Hill, and the 
march of improvement reaches it and dooms it to be 
cut down because somebody thinks it would not look 
well in his yard, or because a street would have to 
deviate two or three feet from a straight line. How¬ 
ever, there is no need to grow angry yet, and the tree 
is not likely to die a natural death for at least a hun¬ 
dred years to come, unless the lightning strikes it, — 
that fierce enemy of the great elms and pines that 
stand in high places. 

There is something very sad about a dying tree. 
I think in the progress of civilization there will, by 
and by, arise a need for the profession of tree doc¬ 
tors, who will be quick at a diagnosis in cases of yel¬ 
low branches and apt surgeons at setting broken 
limbs, and particularly successful in making the de¬ 
clining years of old trees as comfortable as possible. 
These physicians will not only wage war against the 
apple-tree borers and the p.ums’ black knots, but a 
farmer will be taught to go thi'ough his woods now 
and then to see that nothing is the matter, just as he 


180 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


inspects his cattle, and he will call the doctor for the 
elms that have not leaved out as they ought, and the 
oaks that are dying at the top, and the maples that 
warp and split their bark, and the orchard trees that 
fail to ripen any fruit. He will be told to drain this 
bit of ground and turn the channel of a brook through 
another, — time fails me to tell the resources of a pro¬ 
fession yet in its infancy ! It is a very short-sighted 
person who looks at the wholesale slaughter of the 
American forests without dismay, especially in the 
Eastern States. The fast drying springs and brooks 
in the farming districts of certain parts of New Eng¬ 
land show that mischief has already been done, and 
the clearing of woodlands is going to be regulated by 
law, I believe, at some not far distant period. There 
ought to be tree laws as well as game laws. 

I thought of this as I drove on, deeper and deeper 
into the woods, and could hear more and more plainly 
the noise of the lumberman at work ; first the ring¬ 
ing hack, hack, of the axes against the live, hard 
wood; and then I caught the sound of voices as the 
teamsters shouted to each other and to their oxen. 
There seemed to be a great deal going on, as if there 
were a crowd of men and a great excitement, hut 
when I could see the open space between the trees 
there proved to be in all five or six placid-looking 


A WINTER DRIVE. 


181 


farmers with one team drawn by two oxen and a 
shaggy, unwilling old white horse for leader. This 
w^as just ready to start, being loaded with logs to be 
carried out to the pond, and it was lucky that we had 
not met it, for the snow was deep and soft outside 
the narrow track. 

The snow was trampled and covered with brush¬ 
wood and fallen boughs, the woods looked torn to 
pieces as if there had been a battle. “ This is the 
way it used to look down in Virginia in war times,” 
said John, the Captain of Horse, who was driving 
me: “ I tell you, you had to dodge when a big shell 
burst among the pine-trees; there would be a crash¬ 
ing and a cracking among the old fellows I ” We 
stopped and spoke to the teamster, and one or two of 
the choppers who were near by came to the side of 
the sleigh, and we asked and told the news. I spoke 
of a fire that had been in the village the night before., 
but they had already found out all about it. It is 
unaccountable how fast a bit of news will travel in 
the country, it is a proof of the frequency of commu¬ 
nication between farming people, — you need only let 
it get a few minutes’ start of you in the morning and 
it will beat you by many miles on a day’s drive. It 
not that a man starts out ahead of you with a faster 
horse and tells everybody he sees along the road, but 


182 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


this invisible telegraph has side-lines, and people who 
live at the end of long lanes and on lonely cross 
roads are as well posted as those on the main thor¬ 
oughfares. 

It would be too slow work following the team, so 
we were directed back'to the pond by another suc¬ 
cession of paths. I noticed the bits of bright color 
against the dull green of the woods and the white¬ 
ness of the snow. The choppers wore red shirts and 
sometimes blue overalls, and there was a much-worn 
brown fur cap, with long ear-pieces that flapped a 
good deal as the energetic wearer nodded his head in 
explaining our way to us, and disputing the length of 
different cart-paths with one of his companions. I 
watched a man creep carefully, like a great insect, 
along the trunk of a fallen tree, and begin to lop off 
its branches. It seemed to me that the noise of the 
lumbermen in the woods must be very annoying to 
the trees and wake them from their quiet winter 
sleep, like a racket in a house at night. The scat¬ 
tered trees that were left standing had a shocked and 
fearful look, as if some fatal epidemic had slain their 
neighbors. Just at the edge of the clearing we 
crossed a little brook, busy under the ice and snow, 
and coming out to scurry and splash around a lichened 
rock with great unconcern, as if it were a child play 
log with its to vs in the next room to a funeral. 


A WINTER DRIVE. 


T83 


There were a great many pines notched with an 
axe to show that they were to be cut; about a hun¬ 
dred and fifty pines in all, the owner told us he was 
going to get out that season, and they had so far been 
able to fell them without doing much damage to those 
they meant to leave standing. Some of the stumps 
were unusually broad ones. They last many years, 
and so the tree leaves its own monument when it 
dies. The inscription on many of the older stumps 
in those w'oods might be Lost at sea, as it is on the 
stones of a sea-port burying-ground, for great quanti¬ 
ties of ship timber have gone from the Agamenticus 
woods to the ship-yards at Portsmouth, and the navy 
yard across the river. 

On my way back to the pond and the road I found 
a place I remembered crossing in my childhood, a 
marshy bit of ground and a small pond in the heart 
of the woods. It looked exactly as it had that early 
winter day so long ago, and I remembered that I had 
seen witch-hazel in bloom there for the first time, and 
had been filled with astonishment at the sight of 
flowers in the snow. There used to be a farm-house, 
now destroyed, at the side of the mountain to which 
this was a short road in winter when the ground was 
frozen. I looked around for the witch-hazel, but I 
was too late for it, it was out of bloorr and, alafe< 


184 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


many ilowers beside ! else I might have thought it 
was only yesterday I was there before, that bit of the 
world had been so unforgotten and unchanged by 
time. I had wondered for years where that little 
pond could be. I had begun to think I needed a 
crooked twig of the uncanny witch-hazel itself to lead 
me back to it. 

The wind seemed to be making a louder noise than 
usual when I came out from the stillness of the woods 
to the open country. The horse was glad to be on a 
better road and struck out at a brave trot, and, indeed, 
it was time to hurry, for it was on the edge of the 
winter twilight and that had been the last load of 
logs to be sent that day from the clearing. I looked 
up again and again at the mountain, and I noticed a 
white place among the trees where there were cleared 
fields, and remembered a story that always interested 
me, that there was once a small farm there where an 
old Scotchman lived alone, many years ago. No one 
knew from whence he came, and there was no clew 
to his family or friends, so after his death the prop¬ 
erty tliat he left fell to the State. There is .some¬ 
thing very strange about such hidden-away lives, and 
one cannot help thinking that there are always peo¬ 
ple who have watched sadly for such stray-aways tc 
come home, even if they are fugitives from justice 
or banished with good cause. 


A WINTER DRIVE. 


185 


Oil the main road, again, I met a dismal-looking 
little clam-man driving buck to the sea. He and his 
horse both looked as if they would freeze to death on 
the way. I heard some clams slide and clash to¬ 
gether in the box on his sled as we turned out for 
each other, but it was nearly empty and I had seen 
it full in the morning, so I suppose he was contented. 
We said good-day, and he went on again. He was 
a little bit of a man, and his eyes looked like a fish’s 
eyes from under the edge of a great, rough fur cap. 
“ He’s very well off,” said John. “ I know where 
he lives at the Gunket.” So, after all, I pitied the 
horse the most, for he never would have been so 
shaggy if he lived in a barn that the wind off the sea 
did not blow through every day, from one end to the 
other. 

The last sight I had of the mountain the top of it 
was bright where the last flicker of the clear, yellow 
sunset touched it, but in the low-lands where I was 
the light was out, and the wind had gone down with 
the sun, and the air was still and sharp. The long, 
cold winter night had begun. The lamps were lit 
and the fires were blazing in all the houses as I hur¬ 
ried home. 



GOOD LUCK: A GIRL’S STORY. 


T seems very odd now to remember that we 
i talked over going to Wiiidy-walls for so 
I many weeks before we could make up our 
minds to it. We thought of all imaginable reasons 
why w'e had better not go, and we all felt a good deal 
like martyrs when we were forced to decide at last 
that we had better spend the summer there. It was 
nine miles from a railroad and four from a post-office, 
and the house might be uncomfortable ; beside, if my 
mother were to be ill nobody knew an3’'thing about 
the doctors. The truth was we wished to spend the 
summer at the sea-shore. We had spent the greater 
part of the last four or five summers in town, but in 
the old days when we were prosperous we lived in a 
house by the sea which we always had missed sadly, 
and now, when we found we must leave the city, the 
thought of three or four months at the shore was 


n 







GOOD LUCK. 


187 


most alluring. But my elder brother, who is the 
most sensible member of the family, was the one who 
decided it, for he convinced us that it would be much 
better for my mother to be inland. At first it had 
been a question of boarding somewhere in the coun- 
ti^, but one day my brother Park came home witli 
the news that the people who had been living in an 
old house of ours in New Hampshire were going 
to leave it, and that it would be vacant the first of 
June. It had belonged to a grand-uncle of my father 
and we had known very little about it; the tenants 
were elderly people and had been there so long that 
it seemed to belong to them more than to us. My 
younger brother Tom and I were dismayed at first, 
but we took more kindly to the new plan when my 
mother proposed that we should go together to put 
the house in order, a few days before the general flit¬ 
ting from town. 

There are four of us, my mother, my two brothers, 
— Parkhurst, who was then in the medical school, and 
Tom, who was to enter college the next year, — and 
myself. I do not know anything more unhappy than 
not having an elder and a younger brother. It is a 
favorite joke of mine that standing between them one 
pulls me up and the other pulls me down, and so my 
character develops symmetrically, and I ought not to 


188 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


be wanting in sympathy or experience. When we 
were all younger we had lived entirely at our ease, but 
of late years we have had reverses of fortune, and the 
Boston fire served us as it did many of our friends. 
It has been very close sailing, with the three of us 
to send to school and to college, and the frightful 
taxes on real estate to be paid. My mother insisted 
that we should not part with our dear old home if we 
could possibly help it, and, indeed, property had de¬ 
creased so ranch in value that it could have been sold 
only at a great sacrifice, although it was so comfort¬ 
able and stood in such a pleasant part of the town. 
I have no doubt it was thought extravagant by some 
people that we should stay there, though we managed 
to live on without getting in debt, but now that Tom 
was to enter college we knew we must rent the old 
house and so increase our income. Park had had 
money enough of his own to pay the expenses of his 
education, and he hoped to go over to Europe the 
next winter ; then my mother and I were to board 
somewhere and Tom would be in Cambridge. We 
hated to think of breaking up, it seemed very hard 
to us, and we knew that we might never again be to¬ 
gether in the dear old fashion, even though my mother 
could ever take the house again, which was, to say 
the least, doubtful. She was often in ill health and 


GOOD LUCK. 


189 


^he change would be very sad. My brothers and I 
would have given anything if in any way we could 
have made it possible f'^r her to stay; if we could 
have made sure she might always have everytliing 
she needed. I do not think we should have minded 
being poor half as much if it had not been for her. 

I can see now what a bles*sing these years were to 
us ; we know the worth of money a thousand times 
better, and we are richer now in a great many ways 
because we were once poor, my brothers and I; while 
we liave friends whose love for us nothing can make 
us doubt. I am willing to say that we often used to 
grumble, but I find there are just as many things I 
want that I cannot buy now, even though I have 
more money. One does not naturally go into such 
personalities as these, but for the sake of my story I 
wished you to know something of its characters to 
begin with. 

We grew more and more resigned to the thought 
of taking Uncle Kinlock’s house. Tom was seen 
looking over his fishing-tackle in the hope of finding 
trout-brooks, and I began to think more kindly of the 
summer in the country, and to make little plans of 
my own. Tom and I thought it the best fun in the 
world to go to Hilton a week before the rest to put 
the house in order; indeed, I think it was the ph-as- 


190 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


antest week of the whole summer. I should like to 
tell you the whole story of it, but I remember that 
we reached the village late one evening, and in the 
morning Tom came to the door of the country hotel 
with a weather-beaten old horse, and after we had 
collected some provision from the shops, and had 
loaded part of our luggage into the back of the 
wagon, we started off for the five miles’ drive, feeling 
ourselves master and mistress of the house already. 
It was a perfect day; I had seen almost nothing of 
the country all the spring, and I think I had never 
felt more pleasure at being alive than I did that 
morning; the wind that blew about among the hills 
was so fresh and sweet, and it was one of the June 
days which make you feel as one does in October 
weather. The clover and daisies were all in bloom ; 
I never saw so many birds together in all my life. I 
began to long for my mother to come, and I said over 
and over again how glad I was that she was going to 
spend the summer there. I remembered delightedly, 
what I had often forgotten before, that she was so 
fond of the country. Tom and I sang a good deal 
at the top of our voices, there being no audience, and 
we were sorry we had no farther to go, though the 
horse was slow and the road was rough, and up hib 
and down all the way. We watched the great whit« 


GOOD LUCK. 


19J 


clouds blow over, and cauglit sight of one mountair 
or great hill after another, far and near — and some¬ 
times we stopped a litile while to let the horse rest 
where it was so pleasant that we really could not go 
on. Tom saw some woods which gave fair prom¬ 
ises of game, and brooks which he said were just the 
places for whole congregations of trout, and he thought 
it was the most delightful bit of country he ever had 
seen in his life. Some children whom we met on 
their way to school looked at us with great curiosity 
and interest, and even the least of the shy sun-bonnets 
knew that we were strangers and foreigners, and they 
all stood still to look after us when we had passed. 

We were in a great hurry to see the house, and the 
last mile or two seemed long. We had been told that 
it was on a hill, and we looked for it in vain for some 
time and thought it must have burned down, until we 
had come through some thick woods and the road had 
turned, and then it was in full view half a mile beyond. 
It certainly was not charming at first sight. It 
.boked gray as if it had never been painted, and there 
were a few tall, sharp spruces in a row at one side. 
It was a square, blindless house with two great chim¬ 
neys, and it stood nearly at the top of a hill which 
would have looked higher anywhere else than there 
•1 the outskirts of the mountains. The road wound 


192 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS, 


along at the side of the hill, and down below us we 
could hear the noise of a small river at the bottom 
of the valley. The house looked squarer and grayer 
as we came nearer, and we agreed it was exactly like 
Uncle Kinlock himself, whom neither of us had ever 
seen within our recollection. There were two or 
three other houses in sight within a third of a mile, 
and it was like comingr into a village at last, for the 
last three miles had been almost entirely through the 
woods. The fields were very green, and the slopes 
were most beautiful in the sunshine, and all the wild 
roses were in bloom. It was certainly a very pleas¬ 
ant country; one could not find fault with anything 
out of doors, and there must be room enough at any 
rate in the old square-roofed house, and that was a 
good thing. I had almost been sure of a room under 
the roof too low for me to stand straight in. 

We had to go to the nearest neighbor’s for the 
key, and had a hearty welcome from the mistress 
of the farm-house, who seemed as glad to see us and 
as kind as if we had belonged to her. She begged us 
to come back to dinner and to supper, and even 
wished us to sleep at her house until ours was faii-ly 
ill order ; but since our chief pleasure in coming first 
had been the prospect of keeping house ourselves, we 
thanked her and said No. There could not be an^ 


GOOD j.UCK. 


193 


trouble about our staying in the house from dampness 
or anything like that, for the people had not been 
long gone and it had been dry weather, and Mrs. Bir- 
uey told us she had kept the windows open a good 
rleal since she had known we were coming. 

We hurried back and unlocked the door, and Tom 
said quickly, with a little whistle, “ It is n’t bad, 
Polly ; ” but I confess that the first impression I had 
was of its being very dismal. There was a narrow 
hall, with an awful blue-gray paper covered with 
fountains which looked as if they had frozen the win¬ 
ter before and had never thawed out. There was a 
prim mahogany table and some straight-backed chairs 
along the wall, and as for the parlor it was so dark 
that I rushed to open the shutters. The furniture 
was not bad of its kind, but it was not old enough 
to be picturesque or quaint; it was an entirely dull 
and commonplace country house of the better class. 
We went about from one room to another; every¬ 
thing was gray and brown and black, so I longed 
for the bright rugs we meant to bring, and to put 
bovvers in the rooms, and for some of our own pos¬ 
sessions to make it look a little home-like. It was a 
place to be homesick in, if one ever was homesick 
lUiy where, so thei’e was great need for us to do every¬ 
thing we could think of to brighten it up. It was 
13 


194 


CO UN TR Y B Y- WA YS. 


with great wisdom that Tom said how many peoplft 
would go out of town that summer and spend no end 
of money in far less comfortable places. I do not 
know whether my brave-hearted young brother was 
trying to make the best of things at that moment, or 
whether he really liked the place from the very first, 
as he always insists now that he did. 

There were four rooms on each floor: two large 
ones and two somewhat smaller, beside the kitchen ; 
and there was a garden which was beginning to show 
a royal crop of weeds though the flowers were bloom¬ 
ing too ; all the early-summer company of old-fash¬ 
ioned flowers. Indeed, one might grow strongly at¬ 
tached to this old place in time, as I certainly did, 
but I am willing to confess that I was dreadfully dis¬ 
appointed in it at first. Some friends of mine, Kate 
Lancaster and Nell}’’ Denis, had once spent a delight¬ 
ful summer at a fine old house by the sea and I had 
been with them for a week or two, so I had foolishl}’’ 
framed my expectations on the memory of that. 
However, there was no use in being dismal, and our 
house might have been worse. We named it Windy- 
walls before we finished our lunch, wliich was tho 
first thing to be thought of after we had opened the 
shutters everywhere and Tom had unharnessed the 
horse and unloaded the wagon. Tom thought it wa« 


GOOD LUCK. 


195 


a very good name ; I had seen it in a novel once. 
We had lunch very early; there really was not a 
great deal to do until a load of goods could be brought 
up from the village ; however, we were busy enough, 
and the old place soon cheered up a little, as if it had 
been a lonely old person who had felt the need of 
young company. 

We found that there were fire-places in almost 
every room, but they were either closed up or had 
air-tight stoves before them, and I told my brother 
that we must get those out of the way before my 
mother came and have the fire-places open, it would 
be so much pleasanter ; so we went to work at once 
in the room we had chosen for hers; and if ever 
there were two forlorn-looking creatures they were 
Tom and I when we had finished, for there was an 
amazing quantity of soot and ashes, and we decided 
we would not try to do all in one day. In the sit- 
tinof-room there was a «:reat Franklin stove which we 
wisely left, as it had a gallant array of brass orna¬ 
ments, and we brought in a quantity of dry wood 
and made fires everywhere. In the parlor we had 
great trouble because the chimney seemed so choked, 
and you cannot imagine our sorrow and dismay when 
B clumsy, half-fledged chimney-swallow tumbled down 
— luckily into the cold ashes at one side the fire, and 


196 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


lay there, giving miserable chirps now and then. Wo 
put out that fire quickly enough! and when we found 
that the poor bird was badly hurt by its fall Tom 
killed it and we took a little vacation in order to at¬ 
tend its funeral under a currant bush in the garden. 

“ But we ought to have some andirons,” said I, as 
we went back to the house, “ there must be some, 
somewhere ; everybody used to have andirons.” And 
Tom said perhaps there were some in the garret, so 
to the garret we went; and here was a great satisfac¬ 
tion, for the oldest furniture, as was not long since 
the fashion, had been stored under the rafters, and 
we found some fine old chairs which only needed a 
little brushing to be made again the chief pride and 
ornament of the house. There were andirons enough, 
both iron and brass ; but the latter had become vari¬ 
ous shades of green and black, and our first question 
to Mrs. Birney, our neighbor, who just then came up 
the creaking stairs, was who could we get to rub them 
bright again. She seemed much amused at our en¬ 
thusiasm over our discoveries, for one could make up 
a history of the household customs of the lastseventv- 
five years in that garret. I did not know the use of 
half the things until Mrs. Birney told me; there 
were spinning wheels for wool and flax, and foot* 
jtoves, and all the apparatus for cooking befoi e ai 


GOOD LUCK. 


197 


open fire ; and there were flax combs and wool cards 
and candle molds, and various reels and trays, and all 
the lanterns that had lighted the footsteps of succes¬ 
sive generations. We carried down the best of the 
chairs, but we should have liked to stay in the garret 
and rummage in the chests until dark, if there had 
not been our own rooms to put in order. Mrs. Bir- 
ney had taken such good care of the house since its 
tenants, an old uncle and aunt of her own, had gone 
away that we found little to do, and we were very 
much obliged to her because she asked us to drink 
tea at her house where we had a very good time. I 
made friends at once with her niece, who was a pale- 
faced, dark-haired girl, who was just home from a 
seminary where she was fitting herself to be a teacher. 
She seemed all tired out, and I was so sorry for her. 
I felt as if she were really a great deal older than I, 
though there was not much difference in our ages, 
for she seemed to have lost every bit of her girlhood. 
I think one advantage of city life is that there is 
much more to entertain and amuse people than in the 
country. I never before had had the chance to know 
country girls intimately, as I did that summer ; but 
the more thoughtful ones among them seem to me to 
be much more thrown in upon themselves and to be 
toore given to narrow routine and a certain formality 


198 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


of life than city girls are. I found this new friend 
of mine knew a great deal more than 1 about school¬ 
books ; I only wish I were half so good a scholar ; 
but the more I thought about her and talked vith 
her the more I wished she would read novels all her 
summer vacation ; good-tempered, well-bred English 
society novels, and no matter if some of them were 
naughty, for she could only see how much better it 
is to be good. I wished her to know another sort of 
people beside the teachers and scholars she was al¬ 
ways with, and I wished to make her world a little 
larger, I liked her so very much. Tom had found a 
crony in Mrs. Birney’s son, who seemed a very good 
fellow and a sportsman by nature, and I heard them 
already planning a long tramp in search of trout; 
for, though one could find some in almost any of the 
brooks, there was capital fishing in more remote 
streams among the hills, and I could see Tom’s eyes 
flash as he talked in half whispers, and I was no 
longer afraid of his growing tired of Windywalls and 
its surrounding country. 

We were very hungry at supper time, as Mrs. Bir- 
ney had evidently expected us to be ; we were very 
merry, and afterward Annie Birney, the niece, and I 
talked a while. I found she was an orphan, and I 
wondered if she did not mind coming back there from 


GOOD ^UCK. 


199 


hftv school, for it was such a bare house, so orderly 
and Clean, and in a way so comfortable; but there 
was only a great yellow county map on the wall of 
the sititng-room where they lived, and the few books 
1 saw were not at all in the line of her really fine 
scholarship. I wondered if she did not find life un¬ 
comfortable ; her education had led her away from 
her family, yet what she had got from her books was 
a dry and useless sort of learning, unless for the sake 
of its being imparted to possible scholars by and by. 
She was certainly no happier, and her life did not 
reach out to other people’s lives any more because of 
it. It did not seem to me that she was meant for a 
teacher, but 1 suppose she would not have been con¬ 
tented with any other employment. It seems to me 
that nature designs very few people to be scholars, but 
when so many make a failure of life we are greatly 
surprised. But we are apt to say that they had a 
good education, when in reality it was the worst edu¬ 
cation in the world for them, since they were not 
fitted to do their work. The result of education 
should be to elevate one’s uses, but sometimes a stu¬ 
dent reminds one of the cheap wooden box in which 
his books are packed. IVe certainly have different 
capacities for assimilation of mental food, and I think 
that to be gifted with a tenacious memory and a brain 


200 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


that is not constructive, and a little heart tha^ w’ll al 
ways be poor and have nothing to give, is a most mel 
ancholy state of affairs. There is a certain kind Of 
character, which, if it tries to be a scholar, is a raioer 
with its wealth, because it does not know how to 
spend and make use of it. 

I think Annie Birney wanted to get out of the rut 
she was in, and that being with young people who 
took great pleasure in life was the best thing that 
could happen to her. I found she had a great capac¬ 
ity for enjoyment, and she added a great deal to our 
pleasure at Windywalls. 

I knew that my brother wished to go fishing that 
very next day, but he was very good and said noth¬ 
ing about it, and we were busy until night putting 
things to rights, for early in the morning our posses¬ 
sions came over from the village. The few days we 
were alone went by very fast, and at last I was wait¬ 
ing impatiently for my mother, whom Tom had gone 
to bring over from the train. It was nearly tea-time 
when they reached the house, and I was delighted 
when I saw how pleased my mother was. I had 
flowers in a dozen places, and some wild sweet-brier 
roses, for which she had a great liking, in her own 
room. We had found the curtains that belonged 
i>n the high-posted beds, and Mrs. Birney and I had 


GOOD LUCK. 


201 


put them up, and I had unpacked the books and 
placed them always with the bright red and blue ones 
on top. The weather had luckily given sufficient 
' excuse for a little fire on the hearth in the dining¬ 
room, which was the most picturesque part of the 
house, with its tall clock and slender-legged side¬ 
board, and there was some pretty willow-pattei-n 
crockeiy to put on the table, and you may be sure 
we had found somebody to rub the andirons, and had 
filled a gingerpot with daisies. I think I never was 
so tired in my life as I was that night, but it was all 
forgotten and I was more than paid for it. Nancy, 
an old servant who had always lived with us and who 
came up with my mother, praised Tom and me to 
the skies and said she should think we had been at 
housekeeping for a year, though I am afraid when 
she inspected her own realm she did not have so 
much respect for us as at first. I am afraid there 
were distinct traces of the means by which we had 
reached the results she had admired, and we did not 
know how to keep order in our kitchen. We had 
houoht some wild strawberries for tea from a little 

o 

orirl who came knockintj at the door, and kind Mrs. 
liirney had brought us a pitcher of cream and an 
other neighbor farther down the road had sent us 
%ome fresh eggs, and we felt already as if we be- 


202 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


longed to the neighborhood. It was pleasant weather 
day after day, and we felt at first, until the weather 
changed, as if Windy walls had been an ill-deserved 
name for the bleak old house from which even the 
trees stood back. In-doors it grew more and more 
home-like, and we sent for some striped awnings 
which we had had in the city and put them over the 
southern windows to keep out the glare of the sun, 
and they made the house look as if it were a grave 
old lady in a young girl’s gay trappings. I grew 
very fond of the hills, and we were continually dis¬ 
covering new drives and walks. There was one 
mountain which I always saw first when I waked in 
the morning and which at last seemed like a friend 
to me. I think we all tried to live as entirely a 
country life as we could, and not to be city people 
who had come to the country for a little Avliile, nean- 
ing to keep apart from its ways as much as possible. 
Of course there were inconveniences, and I confess 
that I was lonely sometimes, but does not that feeling 
come to one anywhere in this world, after all ? Peo¬ 
ple came to visit us now and then, and I sincerely 
wish I could spend a part of every summer at Winrlv- 
walls, in spite of its having seemed very forlorn and 
a real trouble when I first knew that I must go there. 
I had time to do so many things which were alwayi 


GOOD LUCK. 


203 


crowded out in Boston, and I do like housekeeping, 
and I must confess to being very fond of doing the 
every-day things which most girls in these days think 
very stupid. 

So we settled ourselves down in peace and quiet¬ 
ness for the long summer among the hills ; and now 
it must be told that, before my mother came, while 
Tom and I were busy getting the house ready and 
Mrs. Birney was helping us, our curiosity was in¬ 
tensely excited by what she said of Uncle Kinlock. 
We were surprised and deliglited to find that he bad 
been considered a most singular man, and it seemed 
that the people in the country i-ound about were a 
good deal in awe of him, as lie was unfortunately sub¬ 
ject to violent fits of bad temper and had very strange 
ways. It was believed that he was enormously rich, 
though we poor Leslies who were his heirs had had 
no very good evidence of that, and we heard it was 
believed that he had hidden most of his money before 
he died. He had lived alone with an old servant, 
whose death had quickly followed his own, but she 
had told a great many curious gtories about him ; that 
sometimes he would disappear for hours together 
when she knew he had not gone out cf the house ; 
Jhat he would go up-stairs and she could not find him 
though she had often taken pains to search, and after 


204 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


a time he would come down the staircase just as usual, 
and would laugh if he were good-natured or swear if 
he were not when she asked him where he had been. 
She insisted that somewhere in the house he had a 
secret room, and you may imagine the delight with 
which Tom and I listened to such a bit of gossip as 
this. I think this old relative of ours must have 
been a little crazy, for we heard that sometimes he 
would not speak to any one for days together. 

One chilly evening we were all together in the 
sitting-room, reading or talking before the fire ; it 
had been raining all day, and my mother said with a 
smile, what a pleasant day it had been in the house, 
and, after all, this was just the weather we had dreaded 
so much when we talked about coming to Hilton, and 
she added by way of warning to her eager and easily 
provoked children, that it was almost always so in 
life ; that most of our misery comes from our fearing 
and disliking things that never happen at all. My 
brother Park looked up from a medical book of os¬ 
tentatious size, and repeated philosophically the old 
French proverb, “ Nothing is certain to happen but 
the unforeseen.” I was reading a little and watch¬ 
ing Tom make some new trout-flies as he sat by mo 
at the table where the lights were. 

“ O Mary,” said he, suddenly, “ did you ever tel 


GOOD LUCK. 


205 


mother that Mrs. Birney says Uncle Kinlock had a 
secret room somewhere up-stairs, and that he hid a 
great deal of money there and nobody ever found it?” 

My mother laughed heartily : “ 0 Tom, how fool¬ 
ish ! — he never had a great deal of money to hide, 
and where could there have been a secret room in 
this square plain house ? I wish there had been more 
good closets ; I don’t wonder that people’s garrets 
used to be so filled in old times, for they never had 
any other place to put things. But I really do re¬ 
member your father’s having heard this story and 
laughing about it, too.” 

“Mrs. Birney said that Uncle Kinlock used to go 
up-stairs and disappear, and the old woman who lived 
with him used to hunt for him everywhere, and after 
a while he would come down and she never knew 
where he went. Some people said he must be in 
league with the devil,” said Tom solemnly, “ and an 
old fellow who hangs round the blacksmith’s shop 
over in the village asked me yesterday if we ever 
found the secret chamber. He said there really 
was one ; his elder brother who used to work here 
told him so; and he said, too, that Uncle Kinlock 
had been paid for some woodland he had sold a few 
davs before he died, and he had not sent the money 
Vo the bank and nobody could find it in the house.” 


206 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


“ There were several people here during his ill¬ 
ness,” said my mother. “ Your father found every¬ 
thing in confusion when he came ; I am afraid the 
money may have been too strong a temptation.” 

“ But where could there possibly be another room ? ” 
said I, trying again to puzzle it out, though Tom and 
I had made a.careful survey together, days before. 
“ There are the four rooms on each floor, and the 
halls, and the garrets, and the closets.” And Park 
said : “ I dare say the old fellow’s time hung heavily 
in rainy weather and he played hide and seek with 
the housekeeper. I don’t doubt he was under that 
great four-poster in the room overhead, and came 
chuckling out after she went away, with feathers all 
over his coat.” 

“ Oh, my dear ! ” said mamma, with an amused 
little laugh, “ if you had ever seen him ! the Grossest, 
stiffest old man in the world! ” 

But the next day Tom and I were off on a long 
walk together, and as we were toiling up a hill he 
said : “ Don’t you wish that story would come true 
about Uncle Kinlock’s money ? It would be such a 
lark if we found it and we could stay on at the house 
m town and Park could go abroad with all sails set, 
and we would have a pair of saddle-horses.” 

“ I should like to find the room, at any rate,” said 


HOOD LUCK. 


207 


I; “it makes me think of the rogicide judges, and I 
lie awake at niglit thinking about it and wondering 
where it could be. But we have looked everywhere, 
unless it is in one of the chimneys.” 

“ There is that little garret-room over the outer 
kitchen, where the little four-paned window is,” said 
Tom. “ I put a ladder up the other day and looked 
in, but there was nothing there.” 

“ So did I,” 1 said. “ It is no use, Tom ; but 1 
wish we could find out how the story started. 1 wish 
we did have more money. I am sorriest when I 
tiiink of mamma’s having to give up the house. I 
know she dreads it. I almost wish we could go over 
to Paris with Park in the fall. I think she would 
like to go abroad again, and it would n’t seem half so 
bad as breaking up and having to board in town. 
We could have a little apartment for the winter, you 
know, and it would be pleasant for Park to live with 
us,” but poor Tom’s face lengthened so at the pros¬ 
pect of being left alone, that I said nothing more of 
my plan. J think he was much fonder of home than 
either Park or I, though that was saying a great deal. 

“ 1 am going to grow rich as fast as I can,” said 
he, pi-esently. “ I wish I were ten years older, and 
jroLi and mamma should do just exactly as you like. 
VVdieii I think she misses anything she used to have 


208 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


I am awfully sorry, and it keeps costing her more 
and more for me, so I know that other things have 
to be given up.” 

“ Never mind, Tom,” said I, “ everybody knows it 
is money well spent. I only wish there were twice 
as much for you.” 

And Tom, who was tender-hearted but very reluc¬ 
tant to let it be noticed, said, abruptly : “ I wish we 
had brought a lunch; I did n’t have half enough 
breakfast I was in such a hurry ; it was like dropping 
a biscuit down a well.” 

“ There is one thing we must do, Tom,” said I, 
after a while, “ before Aunt Alice comes ; you know, 
we have never opened the fire-place in that room, 
and she is apt to be chilly. I think she would like 
a little blaze on the hearth. Suppose we get it ready 
after dinner while the others are out driving. I think 
there is only a fire-board to be taken away and we 
could have it all in order before they come back. 
I ’ll rub one andiron if you will the other.” 

“ There are n’t any more brass ones,” said Tom, 
‘ but we can give her the funny iron clogs ; yes, of 
C( urse we will do it; are you sure it is n’t bricked 
up?” 

Park was going to drive my mother to the village, 
wd they started after an early dinner and Tom and 


GOOD LUCK. 


209 


I were just beginning our work, when an old clergy¬ 
man who lived some distance away came to call upon 
mamma, and of course we wished to fill her place as 
well as possible in giving him hospitality, but we 
were dreadfully afraid he would stay all the after¬ 
noon, though we were really so glad to see him. 
When he had gone, promising to come back to drink 
tea with us after making some other calls, we hurried 
up-stairs and were soon busy again, and Tom pulled 
away the fire-board which had always rattled when 
there was a breeze, and found the fire-place was open, 
so there would be only the pile of soot and ashes to 
carry down-stairs. But it was a miserably shallow 
fire-place, not half so deep as those in the other 
rooms. Tom was on his knees before it, when sud¬ 
denly he stopped and seemed to be lost in thought. 
“ What is it ? ” said I, with a good deal of curiosity, 
but he did not answer, as he rose and opened the 
closet door which was on that side of the room. 
There was nothing inside but some blankets ; it was 
a shallow closet with two shelves at the top and some 
pegs underneath, and Tom said, eagerly, “ Come round 
here, Polly,” and I followed him out into the nail 
and into the other corner-room at the back of the 
chimney, where he opened the opposite closet d^^or; 
ooked in at Park’s coats, and gave a shout nd 
14 


210 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


caught me by the shoulders and behaved as if he had 
gone crazy. “ I wish I knew how to get in; it’s 
Uncle Kinlock’s den, don’t you see ? ” said he. 
“ There must be a place at the side of the chimney 
between the closets, they don’t take up half the 
room ; don’t you see the chimney goes way through 
and the back of this closet is n’t the back of the 
other ? Hi yi! ” and my brother went hopping 
about or one foot by way of expressing his joy at 
such a discovery. I could not understand what he 
meant at first, but I thought of Kate Lancaster at 
once. There was no knowing what we might find, 
and there had not been a sign of a secret closet in 
the house at Deephaven. Tom began at once to 
take down the coats from their pegs ; Park was very 
orderly, but we threw them all about the room. We 
looked carefully, but there was no sign of any way 
to get through, and at last we gave up and went back 
to the front-room closet, and searched there for some 
sign of a door or sliding panel. It was very exciting, 
and Tom at last mounted a chair and looked along 
the shelves as if he thought the way in was like the 
entrance to a dove-cote, but at last I saw him reach 
ever and pull at something; and he threw a bit ol 
wood on the floor and then another and pulled out 
the shelf a little way, and kicked the back of the 


GOOD LUCK. 


211 


closet which seemed to be loosened, and I helped 
him push it along toward the chimney and saw a 
dark place behind it. 

We could not get the door far back enough for 
any light to go in, and it was close quarters at any 
rate, to push through. “ You may fall, Tom,” said 
I fearfully, my courage failing me all of a sudden. 

“ Down into the china closet! ” said my brother 
with a very scornful air, as if he thought I ought to 
know the architecture of the house better than that. 
“ Let’s have a light, though ; there’s a candle over 
on the dressing-table,” and I hurried across the room 
to get it. 

That was a miserable moment, for I looked out of 
the window to see mamma and Parkhurst driving 
slowly toward home with the old clergyman following 
them, blissfully unconscious of their being most un¬ 
welcome. 

Tom groaned when I told him : “ We must be 
quick and shut it up,” said he, and I was only too 
willing, for we wanted all the glory for ourselves. 

“There are all Park’s clothes scattered over his 
floor,” said Tom, as he pushed and tugged at the 
panel, and I flew to put them in their places as well as 
I could and had just succeeded when I heard mamma 
«ome into the lower hall. Tom had gone to the gar 


212 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


ret for the iron dogs, and was just coming back with 
them, serenely, when he met her on her way to her 
room. She laughed to see the plight we were in, for 
we were gray with ashes, and thanked us for open¬ 
ing the fire-place; it would be so much pleasanter for 
Aunt Alice. “ You are very thoughtful children,” 
said she in her tender way, which always went 
straight to our hearts, and she put one of her arms 
round each of us as we stood before her and kissed 
us. Tom’s eyes filled with tears in a minute; he 
was greatly excited. I did not know what he would 
do, but he kissed her again in his rough, boyish fash¬ 
ion of two or three years ago, when he had not prided 
himself on being undemonstrative, and rushed off 
down-stairs two or three steps at a time. 

“ What has come over the boy ? ” said my mother, 
as I followed her into her own room. “ Here are 
some letters for you, and your Aunt Alice will be 
here day after to-morrow. I had a letter from Mrs. 
Phillips, who is in Baltimore, and she tells me that 
Mrs. Anderson, your grandmother’s old friend, is very 
ill and will probably live only a few days. I wish 
I could have seen her again, dear old lady,” said 
mamma sadly. “ I was so sorry to refuse, this 
spring, when she wished ra’e to come to her, but li 
could not be helped.” 


GOOD LUCK. 


213 


I knew why she had not gone ; I had something 
jf Tom’s certainty that we should find a fortune in 
the secret closet into which we had almost looked.; 
and I hoped that mamma might never have to give 
up anything again. I remembered that I had gone 
away for a visit just after she had quietly declined 
this invitation. 

“ She was always very fond of me, I think,” said 
my mother. “ She always treated me as if I we^e 
still a child ; I suppose she could not realize the 
flight of time. I have felt so old most of the time 
these last ten years that it was pleasant to have some¬ 
body think I was young, and it always carried me 
back to my girlhood to go to see her.” 

“ I wish you could have seen her again,” said I, 
and mamma looked up at me as if she had been un¬ 
conscious for a minute of my presence ; I could see 
she was much saddened; she always clung closely to 
her old friends. 

‘‘ The letter has been remailed two or three times, 
I ought to have had it days ago,” said she, and then 
I left her to go to dress, and afterward hurried to find 
Tom, whom I found entertaining our guest with 
mamma for aid. He was quite himself again, and 
gave me a careless and triumphant nod. He whis¬ 
pered to me that we must go in *liat night after the 


214 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


Others were asleep, and I was willing; but Mr. Ash- 
urst was soon after persuaded to stay the night with 
us and occupy that room, to Tom’s and my great dis¬ 
comfiture, though perhaps it was just as well, for 
Park would certainly have heard us rattling in his 
wall, and mamma was always a light sleeper. It was 
misery to be obliged to wait until next day. 

Next morning I tried to make Tom ready to meet 
his disappointment, for I did not believe ve should 
find a fortune, but at any rate we were both a good 
deal excited, and were so persistent in sending my 
mother and Park to the village for the letters and to 
do some trumped-up errands of ours, that they at 
once suspected a plot. We were given to little sur¬ 
prises, as a family, and mamma accepted the situa¬ 
tion ; and though it was a hot morning she went 
away with my brother, while Tom and I could hardly 
wait until they were out of the yard. 

“ Don't be too sure, old fellow! ” said I, for we 
had flown up-stairs, and I lit two candles while he 
was unfastening the panel. He pushed his way in 
and 1 quickly followed him. It was a close little 
place, and at first, coming from bright daylight into 
flickering candle-light, I could not see. It was like 
a large closet, and part of the space was in the side 
of the chimney like sn arch in a cellar, dark as » 


GOOD LUCK. 


215 


pocket, and as we became accustomed to the light wa 
could see an old three-cornered chair before a small, 
upi ight desk; there was a queer old lamp fastened to 
the wall with a candle stuck in it, and some books 
and newspapers were scattered about, much gnawed 
by mice. It was very stuffy, and it might have been 
a safe refuge for a regicide judge, but I could not im¬ 
agine anybody’s wishing to stay there for any other 
reason than to escape pursuit, which might, after all, 
have been Uncle Kinlock’s motive, for we had al¬ 
ready heard that his housekeeper sought for him dil¬ 
igently. 

“ Hold both the candles, will you ? ” said Tom, 
“ I’m going to look in the desk,” and finding it was 
locked he wrenched it open to find some pigeon-holes 
full of old letters and business papers and a great 
number of cuttings from newspapers, but there was 
also a worn leather wallet, which we opened in a 
hurry, to find some money after all; a large roll of 
old-fasiiioned bank-bills, and a little silver. “ Do 
you suppose the bills are good for anything?” said I, 
unkindly ; “ were not people given a certain time in 
which to redeem them?” And then we opened a 
little drawer which was also locked, and found some 
gold pieces ; there were two or tnree hundred dollars, 
^nd most of the coins looked quaint and old, so this 
was real treasure. 


216 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


“ It is not a very great fortune after all,” said I. 

“ Who ever thought it would be ? ” said Tom, i^ 
his every-day tone. “ What do you suppose they 
will say when they come home ? This must be the 
money that was paid for the land ; is n’t it silly that 
no one ever found it before in all these years ! ” And 
really I do not think he was half so disappointed as I 
was. Tom is very clever at adapting himself to cir¬ 
cumstances. 

There were some old books which would be a de¬ 
light to my elder brother, who had a great fancy for 
such things, and we began to wish for his return. 
We read many of the letters and found very few that 
were interesting, except one or two from my grand¬ 
father, but there were some that my father had writ¬ 
ten Uncle Kinlock, when he was a boy, which we 
were very glad to see. 

At last we heard the wagon coming back and went 
in triumph to tell of our discovery. “We have found 
Uncle Kinlock’s secret chamber,” said Tom, as if it 
were of no consequence to him whatever, “ and it is 
a sort of closet in the chimney, a horrid little place, 
and we found some gold pieces and a lot of bank- 
bills in an old wallet, but I don’t believe those are 
good for anything. Come up, and we will show it to 
you.” 


(WOD LUCK. 


217 


But I noticed that mamma looked very pale, as f 
lometliing liad happened, and Park seemed excited, 
and neither of them had a word to say, so I begged 
them to tell me what was the matter. Mamma came 
toward Tom and me and held us fast again as she 
had done the day before. “ 0 my dear girl and 
boy ! ” said she, “ you will not be poor any more ^ 
dear old Mrs. Anderson is dead, and she has left half 
her money to me for my mother’s sake. You have 
been so kind to me, and you have made me so rich 
always with your love, and I never knew until now 
how much I have wished to do for you.” 

Tom and I were dazed for a minute and we all 
went into the house ; it was a great surprise to us all, 
and we could not take it in. Tom looked out of the 
window and whistled a little, and drummed on the 
sill. “ I found two four-leaved clovers this morn¬ 
ing,” said he, presently, “ there they are on the table ; 
I say. Park, will you come up to see the den ? ” 

I do not remember that we changed our fashion of 
living, after that day, though earlier in the season 
we had been apt to find fault with it, and to wish for 
something that we did not have. We had thought, 
too, that we were staying at Windywalls because we 
must, but we did not leave there until late in the au¬ 
tumn, and with deep regret even then, which show® 
^iie idleness, at least, of quarreling with necessity. 



MISS BECKY’S PILGRIMAGE. 


I. 

EFORE her brother, the Rev. Mr. Parsons, 
died, Miss Becky and he had often talked 
about going back to Maine, to visit their 
old friends; but somehow the right time had never 
come, and now, when she thought of going all by 
herself, she felt as if it were her duty to carry out 
this cherished wish. 

To be sure, it would be sad to go alone. They 
had often said that there would be many changes, 
and they should find few persons who remembered 
them; and so it would not have been altogether 
cheerful, at any rate. The minister and his sister 
had had few relatives, and most of those were dead, 
except a cousin in Brookfield, whom they had heard 
from now and then, but, though they reminded each 
other of the changes that had taken place, they stiL 










.}nSS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


219 


instinctively thought of their native town as if it 
were very nearly the same as it used to be when 
they had last seen it, thirty or forty years before. 
Their father and mother had died when they were 
very young, and Miss Becky had lived with an old 
aunt. Her brother had early shown unmistakable 
p’.’oofs of his calling to the ministry, and had used 
most of his share of their small fortune for his educa¬ 
tion ; and he had been settled in his first parish only 
two or three years when Miss Becky went to live 
with him, her aunt having suddenly died and Mr. 
Parsons being in distress for a housekeeper. It 
proved a most judicious arrangement, for neither of 
them ever married,' and they were capitally suited to 
each other, having tliat difference of disposition and 
similarity of tastes which make it possible for two 
people to live together without being too often re¬ 
minded of the fact that we are in this world for the 
sake of discipline, and not enjoyment. It was always 
said that Mr. Parsons had been disappointed in love 
while he was pursuing his studies at the theological 
school, and whether he took this for an indication 
that he would be more useful as a single man I do 
not know ; but, at any rate, in spite of frequent good 
chances and the way to seize them being made easy 
for him by members of his parishes, he never fell in 


220 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


love again and seemed to grow better satisfied with 
life year by year. He was a handsome man, and 
Miss Becky was proud of him. He was to her not 
only the best of preachers and kindest of men, but 
the most admirable of gentlemen. She had a thor¬ 
oughly English respect for the cloth, and she had 
been born in the days when, in her native New Eng¬ 
land town, the league of Church and State was pow¬ 
erful and prominent, and the believers in the Con¬ 
gregational mode of worship and church government 
were able to look down upon other sects as dissenters. 
She had left Brookfield with great regret, though she 
had not known how dear the old place was to her until 
she came to leave it. She had never been very happy 
at her aunt’s, for she never had liked her uncle very 
well, and his wife was a fretful, tiresome sort of 
woman, who made it so uncomfortable for every one, 
when she was not pleased, that her household became 
cowards in never daring to take their own way or to 
have minds of their own about even their own affairs ; 
and it seemed a bright future to Miss Parsons to have 
a home of her own, as she knew her brother’s house 
would be, for she was to have all the good fortune of 
a minister’s wife, — the glory and honor and pride 
of it, with none of the responsibility of suiting lier 
B('If to the parish, which in a country town is soinf> 
tinies no light weight to carry. 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


221 


It was a long journey to take, for Mr. Parsons 
had been called to a church in AVesterii New York, 
which seemed to Miss Becky like a foreign country. 
It was known throughout Brookfield that she was 
to start one Monday morning, and on Sunday her 
departure was referred to in the long prayer before 
the morning sermon, and in the evening meeting 
both deacons and some other pillars of the church 
prayed devoutly that she might be kept from danger 
and peril on her journey, and that she might help to 
scatter the good seed among the far-away people 
with whom she was to make her home. It was al¬ 
most the same thing as if she were going to be a 
foreign missionary, and she was very solemn about 
it; but after she reached Alton it seemed as civilized 
and as home-like as Brookfield itself, and any sacri¬ 
fice she had gloried in making proved to have been 
only in her imagination. Twice since then Mr. Par¬ 
sons had accepted calls to other parishes, farther 
AVest, and for the last twenty-seven or twenty-eight 
years they had been in Devonport, which had started 
to be a rival to New York city itself. Jt had been 
disappointed and left at one side by the railroads, 
which presently put an end to the usefulness of a 
caiial wdiich had brought some business to the little 
^own, and it had grown very dull and a good deal 


222 


COUNTRY BY-WAYtS. 


less important in its own mind. The minister and 
his sister had lived on year after year in comfortable 
fashion. The salary was small, but, fortunately, cer¬ 
tain, and Miss Becky had a little income which re¬ 
lieved her from any feeling of dependence or uncom¬ 
fortable humility toward the parishioners. Her hand 
had been asked in marriage more than once ; but she 
never had thought it best to change her situation, for 
in neither case had it appeared likely that she should 
better herself, and she felt that there could be no 
reproach attached to single-blessedness while she 
kept her brother’s house, and he was a minister of 
the gospel. It gave her a position and duty for 
which one must have a vocation. 

But, as I have said, as years went on. Miss Becky’s 
heart and thoughts were oftener and oftener turned 
toward Brookfield; and the minister himself, from 
hearing her say so much about it, came to have as 
great a wish as she to go back to New England. It 
is always home to all the people who go away from 
it to the westward. As they grow older they love it 
better and better, and it is a strong bond between the 
older settlers if in their youth they had some knowl¬ 
edge of each other’s neighborhoods. The hearts of 
New England travelers are often touched at being 
asked to visit some old people, because they cam© 


MISS BECKTS PILGRIMAGE. 


223 


from the Eastern States, and with all the Westerner’s 
pride in his new country his thoughts often turn 
fondly toward the rising sun. There is in this gener¬ 
ation an instinctive homesickness that will probably 
be outgrown in the next. To any subject of the 
Queen England is always home, and a Canadian or 
a New Zealander is first of all and last of all an Eng¬ 
lishman. 

Miss Becky’s brother, for some months before iiis 
death, had not seemed so strong as usual. He was 
several years older than she, and seemed very old in 
that part of the country where most of the people are 
young or, at furtliest, middle-aged. He had never 
been in the habit of taking stated vacations (in fact, 
it had been a matter of pride and principle with him 
not to do so) ; but early in the summer he had said 
he should take a rest of a month when September 
came, and then they would go to Brookfield. He 
wished to verify some dates and records, and, though 
there were few people he cared much to see, there 
were a good many tombstones, and the old town itself 
was dearer to him than he ever used to believe. He 
had been hardly more than a boy when he left it, and 
it was his long-lost boyhood that he hoped to find 
again. They would go to the seashcre for a little 
while — he should like to get a whifi’ of salt air ; and 


224 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


on their way home they would stop in New York, 
wliere there was to be a general meeting of the 
churches that was of great interest to him. 

They talked about their plans like two children ; 
but they never carried them out, for, as I have said, 
the minister died. Tt was a great shock to Miss Becky, 
who until the very last was sure that a change of air 
was all that her brother needed to make him well and 
strong again; but he only went on a last short jour¬ 
ney instead, and all the clergy in that corner of the 
world assembled to follow him, and they preached 
about him, and wrote about him in the religious news¬ 
papers, and said how sadly he would be missed and 
what a pillar had fallen. And then the world went 
on very much the same as ever, except to Miss Becky, 
who felt as if it had come to an end. 

She stayed on in Devonport for a while, until she 
began to be very unhappy. The parish was hearing 
candidates witli a view to settling a successor to Mr. 
Parsons, and they seemed so unfit for his place (as, 
indeed, they were, being mostly young and puffed up 
with pride) that she listened to them with great im¬ 
patience and distress, and she made up her mind, by 
little and little, that as soon as the spring opened she 
would go to Brookfield and make a long visit. After 
til, there were a good many people in that place and 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


225 


its neighboring towns wliom she wished to see, and 
wliom she thought would be glad to see her ; and, if 
she did not care to vi at, she had it in her power to 
board for a while, and the more she thought about it 
the more in a hiirrj she felt to be on the way. She 
was by no means a rich woman ; but, if she lost noth¬ 
ing, she would have enough to live on comfortably, 
since she spent but little and had an uncommon fac¬ 
ulty of making that little go a long way. 

The journey to Boston was bewildering and tire¬ 
some to her, for the most part; but when she was 
fairly started one morning to take the last half-day’s 
car-ride, she was much delighted, and looked out of 
the window eagerly, and examined the faces in the 
car, to see if there might not possibly be one that was 
familiar. The very names of the stations were de¬ 
lightful to her ears, and after a while she felt as if she 
wei-e traveling in disguise and as if everybody would 
be oveijoyed if she only told them who she was. “I 
have n’t been here for forty years,” she told the con¬ 
ductor, after he had answered some question she had 
put to him ; and he looked at her curiously (as if to 
see whether she was an old acquaintance, she thought), 
and said that she must liud things a good deal changed. 
She heard a gentleman in front call him Mr. Pres- 
rott, and, if he had not hurried on, she w^ould have 
15 


226 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


asked him if he were not one of the sons of an old 
schoolmate of hers, who had married a Prescott and 
gone to live in Portland. She was sure he had a look 
of Adaline Emery. 

It was a great pleasure that at one of the stations 
a new-comer took a seat beside her, the cars being 
full. She was a woman of about her own age, and 
evidently a journey was a matter of great importance 
to her. So Miss Becky felt a sympathy for lier, and 
ventured to say that she had been in the cars for 
nearly two days and nights, after her companion had 
asked the name of one of the stations which she had 
failed to hear. 

“I want to know if you have!” said she, looking 
at Miss Becky with respect. “ Seems to me I could 
n’t stand it, noways; but then it ain’t come in my lot 
to be much of a traveler. Was you ever this way 
before ? ” 

“ I was born and brought up down in Brookfield,” 
answered Miss Becky; “ but I have been away pretty 
near forty years. I wonder if you are acquainted 
about there any.” 

“ AVhy, I was raised in Brookfield,” said the woman, 
and I’ve got a brother and sister living there. I’m 
just going to Brookfield now, to stop with them. J 
thought it was a great while since I was there ; bu 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


227 


you beat me. I was there niue years ago, and I ex¬ 
pect I shall find a good many changes.” And our 
two friends looked at each other searchingly, and in 
a minute a glimmer of satisfaction overspread Miss 
Becky’s face. “ I declare to my heart if you are n’t 
Mahaly Robinson ! I thought you looked sort of nat¬ 
ural when I see you come into the cars. I s’pose you 
must have forgot all about Rebecca Parsons by this 
time.” But her friend had not, and they grasped 
each other’s hand and kissed each other at once, and 
the sudden outburst of affection was most amusing to 
the neighboring passengers. 

“ Why, I feel as if I had got home, seeing you,” 
said Miss Becky, thinking how dreadfully old her 
friend looked, while the friend thought exactly the 
same thing of her, and each flattered herself that in 
her case time had left but little trace of its flight. “ I 
forget your married name ? ” inquired Miss Becky. 
I did know it at the time. You know you wrote me 
just after I went out West; but I always think of you 
as Mahaly Robinson — same’s when we went to 
school together.” 

“ I married fiist with a Sands; but I lost him when 
we had only been mai’ried three years,” said Mahala, 
without any appearance of regret, “ and then I mar¬ 
ried Joshua Parker, of Gloucester. I’ve been a widow 


228 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


now these fourteen years. He was a ship-master and 
used to sail out o’ Salem when I first met with him ; 
and after that he was master of the Fleetwing, out 
o’ Boston for a good many years. lie was lost at 
sea. She was never heard from after they left Cal¬ 
lao. I wa’n’t left very well off; we’d had consider¬ 
able sickness, and his father and mother and a foolish 
sister made it their home with us and was consider¬ 
able expense. I always set a great deal by Father 
Parker, though. He was a real good man and he 
always did what he could. He got frost-bit down to 
the Banks, one winter, and his hands and feet were 
crippled. We had hard scratchin’ one spell: but my 
boys and girls got so’s they could work, and then 
there wa’n’t any more trouble. I’ve had a good deal 
to be thankful for; but I’ve seen the time I’d a-laid 
down and died, I was so discouraged. I live with my 
youngest daughter now, and she’s got as handsome a 
little farm as you ever see and a good husband. He’s 
doing well, too. They are always thinking o’ things 
to please me, both of ’em. I ain’t got a child I’ve 
been sorry for, and that’s a good deal to say. There’s 
a sight of risk in fetchin’ up six of ’em. But I want 
to know how it’s been with you. 1 see by “The 
Congregationalist ” that your brother had been taker 
tway. 


^fISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


229 


“Yes.” said Miss Becky, with a sigh. “He was a 
dreadful loss to me. We VI been together so many 
years, and there never was a man like Joseph, any 
way. He was known all through that part of the 
West. We’d talked about coming on, and it’s real sad 
to come without him; but I feel’s if it was just what 
he’d want me to dOj if he knew it. I hoped I should 
see him stand up and preach in the old meeting-house. 
Some of his sermons were thought a great deal of. 
I could n’t always understand the deeper thought in 
’em,” said Miss Becky, proudly. “ We set a good 
many times to come on ; and we did get as far as 
New York once, to the meetings of the American 
Board, and then somehow there was always some 
place we thought we must go to first, out West. It 
ain’t that we’ve stayed right in the same place all 
these years,” she explained. “ My brother used to 
travel about a good deal. Seems to me, coming back 
this way, T miss him more than ever. I keep think¬ 
ing o’ things I ought to tell him when I get back to 
Devonport. It's been right hard to get reconciled.” 

“ Then you ’re not coming back to settle : ” asked 
Mrs. Parker. I thought first that perhaps you was. 
Thei-e, we ’re a getting into Portsmouth ; but I don’t 
suppose I should know my way round. 1 lived here 
’long of my first husband, and I always liked the 
olace.’ 


230 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


“ T remember coming, when I was a young girl, to 
stop with my aunt Dennett for a spell, over on the 
Kittery shore. We ’ve got to go across the river, 
have n’t we? I should n’t wonder if you could see 
the house. My sakes alive,! how good and fresh the 
salt water smells ! Don’t it? I declare, how it car¬ 
ries me back ! ” exclaimed Miss Becky. 

“ The wind must have come round into the east,” 
said Mrs. Parker, wisely. “ It was a little north of 
west when I started this morning, and I thought I 
should have a good day; but then we ’re going right 
back into the country. Who are you expecting to 
stop with ? ” 

“ I wrote to Cousin Sophy Annis, because I’ve been 
in the habit of hearing from her every year, and one 
of her sons is living West, and has stopped with us 
several times. I did n’t get any answer, for I started 
off pretty sudden. I found I was going to have com¬ 
pany as far as Syracuse. I can go to the tavern, if it 
don’t seem to be convenient for Sophia. I don’t know 
but it would be just as well, any way, for I feel as if 
I was almost a stranger. I should n’t mind the ex 
pense,” she added, with a good deal of satisfaction. 

“ I know they won’t let you go to no tavern, 
Brookfield folks will have altered a good deal if they 
have come to that! ” exclaimed Mrs. Parker, in a 




MISS BECKY’S PILGRIMAGE. 2151 

rray that was gratifying. “ You ’ll find more that ia 
glad to see you than you’ve any idea of. If you 
don’t find anybody a-waiting for you, you come right 
home with me to Sister Phebe’s ; and then they ’ll 
take you over to Sophy’s, after tea or in the morning, 
just as you are a mind to. You know it’s right on 
the way there, and Sophy won’t think nothing of 
your .stopping ’long of me, as we fell in with each 
other in the cars.” 

But It seemed very lonely to Miss Becky, who was 
tired with her long journey; and she became uncer¬ 
tain of her reception, and almost wished she had not 
undertaken the pilgrimage. She began to understand 
how changed the place must be, and how little it 
would be like the Brookfield she had left. And when 
Mrs. Parker remembered that she had spoken of her 
brother’s preaching in the old meeting-house, and ex¬ 
plained that it had been torn down, to make place for 
a new one, the year before, it was really a great sor¬ 
row to our friend. She felt that if it were not for 
visiting the burying-ground it would not have been 
worth while to go at all. 

“ I did think it would be so pleasant to set in the 
old pew again, where I used to set when I was a 
girl,” she said, sadly. “ I have thought just how it 
•Jl looked so many times ! ” As they neared Brook- 


232 


CO UNTR Y B Y- WA YS. 


field, the country grew more and more familiar, and 
Miss Becky looked out of the car-window all the time, 
and was again in high spirits. She told the names of 
the hills, and when she saw a farm-house that she re¬ 
membered, not far from the railway, she was perfectly 
overjoyed, and hurriedly collected her carpet-bag, and 
her basket, and her big pasteboard box, that held 
some treasures which she had been afraid to trust to 
her trunk. “ Do tell me if I look all right, IMahaly,’* 
she said, quickly passing her hand, in its loose black- 
thread glove, over the front of her bonnet and her 
neat frisette. “ I don’t s’pose I am fit to look at. 
I’ve always had to keep myself looking nice, on Jo¬ 
seph’s account, being a minister, and we were always 
subject to a good deal o’ company,” she remarked ; 
but Widow Parker said she looked as if she had only 
traveled from the next town, and in a few minutes 
more they were standing on the platform of the Brook¬ 
field station. 

There were only strangers waiting there, and they 
were mostly little boys, and Miss Becky felt a strange 
sense of desolation; but presently some one greeted 
Mrs. Parker (who was much flustered) with great 
cordiality, and she walked off, without giving a 
thought to her fellow-traveler, who stood still, look 
5ng anxiously at every face that passed, as if she? 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


233 


hoped to find it familiar. She held the box and the 
l);jg and the basket, and suddenly wondered if her 
trunk had come, and looked down the platform the 
wrong way, and distressed herself with the thought 
that it had not been put off the train, since it was not 
in sight. The little boys strolled away, and the rest 
of the people began to disappear also, and Miss 
Becky remembered her companion, and wondered 
what could have become of Mrs. Parker, who had 
seemed so friendly ; and just then some one came 
driving up to the platform. It was a young woman, 
and she jumped out quickly and came toward our 
friend. 

“ I wonder if you are Miss Parsons ? ” asked the 
girl, pleasantly. 

“ Why, yes, dear,” said poor Miss Becky, who had 
been almost ready to cry. 

“ Grandmother said that I had better come round 
by the depot, but the rest of us were certain you 
would n’t be heie until to-morrow. How do you 
do ? ” and she kissed the old lady as if she really 
cared something about her. “ We are all so pleased 
because you are coming. Now let me see to your 
ban-oraore. We can take the trunk right into the back 
of the wagon.” 

“ I was just feeling afraid it had n’t come,’* said 


234 


COUNTRY BY-WATb. 


Miss Becky; but the station-master asked if that 
were not the one which he was just going to drag 
into the depot, and in a few minutes more they were 
in the wagon, driving away. 

I hope you won’t be too tired,” said the girl. 
“ We shall have to ride three or four miles ; but then 
it is nice and cool.” 

“ T always liked to ride,” said Miss Becky, “ and it 
is so refreshing to get out of the cars. There! you 
don’t know what a difference there is between the air 
here and out West; but now I want you to tell me 
who you are ? ” 

“ I forgot you did n’t know,” said the girl, laugh¬ 
ing. “ We have talked so much about you that I for¬ 
got you did n’t know me just as well as I do you. 
I’m Annie Downs, and my mother was Julia Annis.” 

“ I can’t believe Sophy Annis has got a grand- 
daugliter as old as you! ” exclaimed Miss Becky. 
“ Why, I don’t feel any older than ever I did, but she 
was four or five yeais older than 1.” 

“ I have a brother and sister older than I,” said 
Annie; “but they’re both married. We lived at 
Freeport; but I suppose you knew that father died 
some years ago, and grandmother was getting feeble, 
BO she wanted mother and me to break up and come tc 
live with her. I have been keeping the town schoo 


MISS BECKTS PILGRIMAGE. 


235 


for two years. It’s very near, you know. Mother’s 
brother carries on the farm — Uncle Daniel. He 
says he remembers you, and your coming to say good- 
by just before you went West; but grandmother says 
he was too young.” 

“ I guess he does remember me,” said Miss Becky, • 
with a sudden affection for this relative of hers. I 
^now he was a dear little fellow, running round the 
kitchen. It was in cold weather, I know. I was 
going to kiss him, and he hid under the table.” This 
was very pleasant and seemed to bring the strange 
relatives much nearer. “ Your mother was the old¬ 
est, and was quite a girl then. I remember hearing 
of your father’s being taken away ; but I always 
thought of you all as little bits of children.” 

“ There, I did feel so lonesome to-day ! ” said Miss 
Becky to old Mrs. Annis and her daughter, that even¬ 
ing ; “ but I feel now as if I had got back among my 
own folks. I like out West; but somehow 1 never 
have felt at home there as I do here, and after Jo¬ 
seph’s death I saw it was being with him that had 
kept me from feeling strange. And I don’t know 
why it is, either, for there are a good many people in 
our place from New England and everybody is free 
and neighborly.” 

Nothing could have pleased Miss Becky more than 


236 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


tlie welcome she received from the townspeople. She 
said over and over again that she had no idea she 
should find so many people who remembered her, 
and the excitement her visit seemed to make was 
deeply gratifying. It was exactly the way her brother 
was treated when he went back to visit one of his 
old parishes, and she accepted invitations to spend 
the day or to make a week’s visit after haying until 
she was entirely confused at the thought of her en¬ 
gagements. It was very pleasant; but sometimes, 
when she was tired, the future suggested itself for 
her decision, and she wondered what she had better 
do when the visits were over, for there was all the 
rest of her life to be lived, and she ought to be mak 
ing some plans. 


II. 

It would not be fair to withhold an account of the 
wretchedness of poor Mrs. Mahala Parker when she 
remembered, on the evening after her arrival at her 
sister’s, that she had meant to bring with her another 
guest. Something happened to remind her of their 
conversation in the cars, and she suddenly looked 
^ray for a minute, while a chill crept over her. 
“ Oh! my good land o’ compassion ! ” she groaned 
What have I been and done ? I believe my mind *8 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 237 

a-failiiJg of me.” And her amazed companions asked 
what could be the matter. 

“ I met Rebecca Parsons in the cars,” said she, 
“coming on from the West. We happened to sit in 
the same seat; but I never should have known her 
if she had n’t called me by name and told me who 
she was. She said she had been gone forty years. 
I should n’t have said it was more than thirty, if it 
was that; but time does go so fast! She did n’t 
seem certain about anybody’s coming to meet her, 
and I told her 1 ’d fetch her along with me, and then 
you’d send her over to the Annises, wdiere she ex¬ 
pected to stop ; and I come right off without ever 
even saying Good-by to her. I don’t know what 
she will think. I never felt so in my life. I don’t 
remember to have seen no other conveyance there, 
and she must ha’ been real put to it to know what to 
do. I got sort of excited, it’s so long since I went 
anywhere before. It must have looked just as if 1 
wanted to get rid of her. There was something on 
my mind all the way here ; but I kept thinking it 
was because I had left something in the cars.” 

“ Well, right after breakfast one of the girls shall 
take you over to the Annises, Sister Mahaly,” said 
Mrs. Littlefield. “You’d feel better to see her 
yourself than to send word. I suppose she will be 


238 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


there, or she may have stopped up to the tavern, and 
tliey ought to know it. And you may as well ask 
them all to come over and take tea to-morrow and 
spend a good long afternoon. I sha’n’t have another 
chance for some time, on account of haying. I was 
calculating to ask our minister, any way ; and when 
I got your letter I thought I would wait until you 
was here.” 

“ Adaline sent to Boston by one of our neighbors, 
who is real tasty, and got me a beautiful cap, just 
before I came away,” mentioned Mrs. Parker. “ She 
said 1 ’d be likely to want it, and those T had were get¬ 
ting a little past; but I told her I wished she had n’t. 
It will be just what I need, though, won’t it ? Re¬ 
becca was dressed real plain ; but everything seemed 
to be of good quality. I dare say she put on what 
was old and would n’t hurt, she had so far to come.” 

Miss Becky had been a little angry at being de¬ 
serted ; but she took a grim satisfaction in thinking 
Mrs. Parker’s mind was not what it used to be, and 
when she made her appearance in the morning, en¬ 
tirely penitent and armed with an invitation to tea, 
she was forgiven in full. The tea-party was a great 
success, and Miss Becky was the centre of attraction 
There were so many questions to be asked and an 
iwered, wherever she went; the fates and fortunes 


MJSS BECKY'S FILGRIMAGE. 


239 


of so many families had to be recounted for her sat¬ 
isfaction ; and she made herself very agreeable by 
giving interesting reminiscences of her own life, and 
telling of the strange customs of some Westerners 
and the contrasts she noticed in the fashions of living 
East and West. She felt herself to be a person of 
great interest and consequence. You may be sure 
that she wore her best black silk, and that she suc¬ 
ceeded in leaving an impression on the minister’s 
mind of her being well posted on clerical and relig¬ 
ious questions. She told the Annis family, compla¬ 
cently, as they drove home together in the two-seated 
wagon, after the tea-party was over, that she always 
felt at home with ministers and knew their ways bet¬ 
ter than she did anybody’s. 

Cousin Sophia was pleased at being the owner of 
such an attractive and satisfactory guest. “ I don’t 
think I ever saw Mr. Beacham appear to enjoy him¬ 
self better,” she said. “ lie is n’t much of a talker, 
as a general thing; but you brought him out right 
off. I tell you, Rebeccy, you ought to set your caj) 
for the parson. lie is well off. We give him eight 
hundred dollars, and he’s got means beside. I think 
he’s been a widower long enough ; but folks here 
has got tired setting their caps for him, ’less it’s old 
Cyiithy Rush, and she ’pears to think that while 
there’s life there’s hope.” 


240 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


lie seems to be an excellent Christian man,” said 
Miss Becky, flushing a little ; but it was too dark for 
anybody to notice it. 

“ I’m going to have him to our house to tea,” said 
Mrs. Annis, giving her daugh^^er a suggestive poke. 
“ lie always likes to come in strawberry time.” 

Annie Downs had been much amused that evening 
at the evident interest which Mr. Beacham and Miss 
Becky took in each other. It was a funny, sedate 
likeness of a mild flirtation between two young peo¬ 
ple. . They were mindful of the respect due to their 
own advanced years and the proprieties of a tea- 
party ; but they found each other very attractive. 
They were both fine-lookitig. Mr. Beacham would 
have been fairly imposing in even a gown and bands, 
but in a surplice he would have been magnificent. 
Oiie longed to see him in a ruffled shirt and small¬ 
clothes, instead of his plain black garments ; but his 
solemn countenance bore on it the stamp of eccle¬ 
siastical dignity. “ Anybody would know ho was a 
minister,” said Miss Becky, decidedly, and she had 
had vast experience among the Western clergy. 

The June days went by quickly, and Miss Parsons 
enjoyed her visit more and more, and felt less and 
less inclination to go back to her Devoiiport life 
Bhe had not supposed that people would be so glad 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


241 


to see her; but, having once welcomed her, they 
never were made sorry, for our friend was really a 
good and pleasant person to know. The young peo¬ 
ple found her full of sympathy and kind-heartedness, 
and she gave a great deal of pleasure wherever she 
went. It was easy to see that she did not think only 
of how her friends greeted her and what they did for 
her, for she was as anxious to help and to give, 
in her turn, and she could be as amusing as heart 
could wish. There was an unfaded girlishness about 
her yet, in spite of the fallen snows of so many win¬ 
ters. She was very happy in Brookfield, and there 
was a companionship to be had even in the cypress- 
grown burying-ground, which was dearer to her than 
she had dreamed it would be. The people in church 
on Sundays soon felt as if she were again their neigh¬ 
bor and friend, and Mr. Beacham found himself look¬ 
ing often toward the Annis pew, as he preached ; and 
he selected his best sermon the next Sunday after 
he met Miss Parsons, and repeated it for her benefit, 
and was rewarded by her telling him, as he gravely 
shook hands with her on his way out of church, that 
It reminded her of one of her dear brother’s on the 
lame text, but Mr. Beacham had expanded the sub¬ 
ject much more fully. “ You know how to make 
things very clear,” Miss Becky said, with a sudden 


242 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


brightening of her eyes and a simple frankness, that 
he thought extremely desirable. “ It is something to 
be most grateful for, if a word we speak reaches and 
helps another struggling soul,” he said, and shook 
hands absently with a parishioner in the next pew. 

Did you see poor Mary Ann Dean at church, to¬ 
day ?” some one asked, as they drove home after meet¬ 
ing. And Mrs. Annis answered that she doubted if 
the poor soul ever got out to church again. ‘‘ I 
have n’t told you about her, have I, R’becky ? She 
was a daughter of Susan Beckett, who used to be at 
your aunt’s a good deal; but it may have been after 
you went West. She has had about the hardest time 
of anybody I know. Their house burnt down, and 
they lost most everything; and four of the family died 
within sixteen months. Mary Ann was left all alone, 
with one brother that drank like a fish, and she had 
to earn what she could and bear tlie brunt of every¬ 
thing. She was a good deal younger than the rest 
of the children. She has been failing this good 
while ; but she would n’t give up. She’s always 
reminded me of a flower in the road that every wheel 
goes over. There ain’t a better young woman any¬ 
where in Brookfield. I set everything by Mary 
Ann.” 

^'T do feel sorry,” said Miss Becky. “ I had it o« 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


243 


my mind in meeting to ask you if any of Susan’s 
folks were about here ; and I noticed that poor, sick- 
looking girl. I ’ll go to see her the first of the week, 
if she don’t live too far off, on her mother’s account, 
if nothing else.” 

> “ It is only a little way,” said Annie Downs. 
“ I ’ll go with you to-morrow afternoon, if you will 
come along to the school-house after school. Cousin 
Becky.” 

Miss Becky was very kind to this new friend, who 
soon grew more ill and quite dependent upon the 
kindness of her neighbors, and our heroine, having 
no family cares, w^as with her a good deal for the 
next fortnight. Haying had begun, and it was lucky 
that so good a nurse was for the most of the time at 
leisure, since the other women were all so busy, and, 
indeed, at any time had their hands full with their 
own work. 

It happened that two or three times Mr. Beacham 
came to visit his sick parishioner; and it must be 
confessed that Miss Becky did not show her usual 
composure in the presence of the clergy, and that slie 
began to feel uncomfortably self-conscious and to 
insist upon it to herself that she took no interest in 
the man whatever. She openly said (feeling all the 
^ime that she might be sorry for it) that she did not 


244 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


consider him gifted in prayer; but even this bold 
treason did not keep her heart from fluttering at the 
mention of his name. The Brookfield people quickly 
caught at the first hint, which was given by a suspi¬ 
cious parishioner, and one Sunday noon Miss Becky 
was joked a little by the people who knew her best, 
which was very discomposing. 

So one day, late in the afternoon, the Annis family 
were not surprised to see the minister and Miss 
Becky come walking up the road together. She had 
been away for two or three days ; but had been left 
at Mary Ann Dean’s to spend an hour or two, on 
her way home, and Mrs. Annis’s first thought was 
that the sick woman had suddenly died, and that they 
were comiiiof together to consult about makins^ some 
arrangements. But Annie Downs was quicker witted. 
“ I should n’t wonder if Cousin Becky had made up 
her mind to settle down in Brookfield,” said she, with 
a little laugh. 

Mrs. Annis hurried to the door. “ Poor Mary 
Ann ain’t gone, I hope ? ” she asked, anxiously , and 
Mr. Beacham looked confused, and answered that 
she seemed as comfortable as usual. ‘‘ Miss Parsons 
and I were speaking of some theological points ta 
which her brother gave much attention,” he apolo- 
ipzed, and everybody felt a little awkward, uutl 


MISS BECKY'S PILGRIMAGE. 


245 


Mrs. Annis bethought herself to take refuge iu her 
duty as hostess. “ I want you to stop to tea with 
us, now you ’re here, Mr. Beachara,” she said, eagerly. 
“ We’ve been thinking of sending for you. I Iiad 
some thoughts of naming Thursday. You always 
like our strawberries, you know.” 

The minister looked very pleased. “ I do not know 
why I cannot accept your hospitality, Mrs. Annis. 
My housekeeper said she should be absent to-night, 
though she doubtless made some provision for my 
supper. And on Thursday I have engaged to be 
away.” 

It was nearly tea-time already ; at least, there was 
hardly time enough to make sure that the feast would 
be appropriate for the guest. Mrs. Annis and Mrs'. 
Downs and Annie all scurried to the kitchen at once, 
and when Mr. Daniel Annis came in from the field 
he was told who was there, and went at once to array 
himself in his Sunday clothes. 

“ You go in and talk to him, Daniel, and Annie or 
1 will be in pretty quick,” said Mrs. Downs. And 
her brother manfully tried to do his duty; but after 
his first greeting and report of the crops he did not 
know what else to say. Miss Parsons had looked 
much embarrassed as he entered, and soon went out 
to the dining-room, leaving the host and his guest to 


246 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


entertain each other; and Daniel wished thau some 
of the women would come back. He thought of the 
unfailing resource of all farmers, and longed to ask 
the minister to come out and have a look at the hogs; 
but, being a minister, he feared it might not be the 
proper thing. 

Happily, Mr. Beacham himself suggested that they 
should take a walk down to the bee hives, and pres¬ 
ently they fell into easy discourse together on some 
parish matters. And after a little while Miss Becky 
reappeared, and mentioned that some one wished te 
see Daniel at the barn, about pressing the hay; and 
while he hurried back to the house our friend and 
the minister strolled along together slowly. 

It was a pleasant old garden, and in the middle 
path there was a long, rickety arbor, covered thick 
with grape-vines. The sun was getting low ; but, 
for all that, the shade was pleasant, and Mr. Beacham 
stopped for a minute, but Miss Becky was uneasy 
and wished he would go on. 

“ Since 1 laid away my dear companion, now seven 
years ago,” he said, in a tone that made Miss Becky’s 
heart thump dreadfully, “ I have had no desire tc 
fill her place in my home, solitary though it has been 
but I find that I am no longer contented with my 
iituation, and that you possess all the qualificationa 


MISS BE CRTS PILGRIMAGE. 


247 


to make me happy. We are not young; but the 
Lord may continue our lives for many years yet, and 
I believe that we should enjoy a united home. You 
already know the responsibilities and cares of a min¬ 
ister’s life, and it seems to me unwise that you should 
return to the West permanently, though I do not 
doubt you have formed many associations which are 
dear to you and which it will be hard to sever. Per¬ 
mit me to say that you have already become very 
dear to me, and that I can assure you of a most heart¬ 
felt and enduring affection. I hope you will take 
the matter, as I have, into serious and prayerful con¬ 
sideration.” 

Miss Parsons felt for her handkerchief; but she 
mistook the way to her pocket, and fumbled at her 
dress without finding it, while the tears were ready 
to fall from her eyes, and Mr. Beacham and the 
grape-leaves and a red hollyhock that had pushed 
through the trellis were all in a dazzle together. 
She had somelfcw expected to have the solemn little 
speech followed by the benediction ; but the minister 
stood there as if he expected her to say something. 

So she put out her left hand toward him, and covered * 
her face with the other, and the handkerchief, which 
was found, at last, just in time. And Annie Downs, 
who was in the strawberry bed not a dozen feet away. 


m 


COUNTRY BY-WAYS. 


hardly daring to breathe lest they should notice her, 
heard a resounding kiss, and then stole softly away 
among the pear-trees, and told her mother she need 
not be worried any more because supper would bo 
so late. 

They went on a wedding journey to Devonport, 
where Miss Becky was so much older than most 
people in town that her returning to them a bride 
caused great fun and astonishment; but everybody 
was very glad. She seemed so happy herself and she 
did not look a day over fifty-five. She carried back 
to the East some household goods that were dear 
to her, and she gave away the rest most generously. 

But she felt very sad when she paid a last visit to 
her brother’s grave, and as she came away she no¬ 
ticed some trees he had planted and tended with great 
care, and she felt as if she were taking a sad fare¬ 
well of all her happy life with him. She was very 
contented in Brookfield and was looked up to by the 
whole parish, and she made Mr. Beacham an excel¬ 
lent wife; but she thought, with all her admiration 
for him, that, although an uncommon writer, he 
never could cpiite equal her brother’s great sermon 
on Faith and Works. Dear Miss Becky ! She often 
thought that her life had been most wonderfully or* 
dered. Everything had happened just right, and 


MISS BECKTS PILGRIMAGE. 


249 


she did not see how it was that all the events of life, 
other people’s affairs, and things that seemed to 
have no connection with her, all matched her needs 
and fitted in at just the right time. If she had come 
to Brookfield the year before she was sure that she 
should have had no temptation to stay there, though 
she and Mr. Beacham did seem to have been made 
for each other. Mr. Beacham would have said that 
it was the unfailing wisdom of Providence ; but she 
wondered at it none the less and was very grateful. 
Perhaps her life would seem dull, and not in the 
least conspicuous or interesting to most people; but 
for the dullest life how much machinery is put in 
motion and how much provision is made, while to its 
possible success the whole world will minister and be 
laid under tribute. 
























































































